I’m not really sure how this happened.
But I’m starting to like JavaScript (with some nuance).
Deno slaps; it has been a surprisingly pleasant experience to build with it.
Originally I wasn’t interested.
Back in 2022, a friend introduced it to me as a better Node.
At that point in my life, I did not have a great relationship with JavaScript, so that sounded like telling me they made a better way to wait in traffic. Big nope.
And to be fair, from what I hear Deno 1.x back then had a lot of rough edges.
After learning about HTMX around 2023, I was sold, so my personal project stack for a while was Go, Templ, Tailwind, Goose, SQLc, and SQLite.
None of my personal projects have an audience bigger than me.
So the lack of a 1.0 didn’t stop me from replacing the database layers with PocketBase. Three single-use tools for one complex one was a worthwhile tradeoff.
Like a lot of other software developers in the industry, we’re being encouraged to learn agentic coding.
To borrow the phrase from Carl Brown of the Internet of Bugs channel, “It makes the easy things easier and the hard things harder.”
There wasn’t anything wrong with any individual part of my stack, but something always felt off within the loop of writing a detailed spec of the end result you want. And then the cycle of prompting and testing till either the result is there or you do it by hand.
I like the experience of go run to iterate quickly without a build step, I loved having batteries included, and I didn’t want to give up compiling to a single executable.
So there went Laravel.
I thought I’d give the JS ecosystem a look again because I heard Bun and Deno both compiled down to a file I could execute.
From a cursory glance, Bun focused on speed and had a solution to the toolchain complexity that burdened the Node ecosystem. And Deno was fast enough and focused on reducing the configuration and dependency hell.
In the end the CSV package won me over.
And it has been a thrilling experience to build with it. There’s no dearth of JS code on the internet for the LLMs to train on.
And it tidied up my stack. Deno, JSX, either JSDoc or TS, HTMX, Tailwind, and Sqlite.
At most two external dependencies to build a prototype for the things I like making with code.
Will update when I have grounded complaints.