Ship faster with the right tools
Honest reviews, setup guides, and workflow tips for developer tools. From terminals to CI pipelines, we cover what actually helps you build better software.
PGlite: Running PostgreSQL in the Browser and Node.js
Learn how PGlite lets you run a real PostgreSQL database in WebAssembly — in the browser, Node.js, and Bun — with full SQL support and zero server setup.
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OpenTofu: The Open-Source Terraform Fork You Should Know About
A practical guide to OpenTofu — what changed from Terraform, how to migrate, and when it makes sense for your infrastructure.
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act: Run GitHub Actions Locally Without Pushing to GitHub
Learn how to use act to run GitHub Actions workflows locally, speed up CI development cycles, and debug failing pipelines without cloud commits.
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PocketBase: A Complete Backend in a Single Binary
Learn how PocketBase gives you auth, a database, file storage, and a REST API in one executable — and when it's the right choice for your project.
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LocalStack: Local AWS Development Without Cloud Bills
Run AWS services locally with LocalStack. Eliminate cloud costs during development, speed up feedback loops, and test infrastructure code without touching your AWS account.
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OpenTelemetry: Unified Observability for Modern Applications
OpenTelemetry provides vendor-neutral instrumentation for traces, metrics, and logs. This guide covers automatic and manual instrumentation in Node.js, the collector, and exporting to backends like Jaeger, Prometheus, and Grafana.
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Vite: The Build Tool That Makes Frontend Development Fast
Vite uses native ES modules during development for near-instant server start and hot module replacement. This guide covers Vite's architecture, configuration, plugins, library mode, and how it compares to Webpack and esbuild.
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Pyright: Microsoft's Fast Python Type Checker
Pyright is a static type checker for Python written in TypeScript. It's faster than mypy, powers Pylance in VS Code, and supports strict mode for maximum type safety. Covers installation, configuration, and common type errors.
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Encore: The TypeScript Backend Framework with Built-In Observability
Encore is a TypeScript backend framework where you define infrastructure as code — APIs, databases, Pub/Sub, caches — and Encore provisions and deploys everything. Covers setup, defining APIs, local development, and deployment.
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tRPC: End-to-End Type-Safe APIs Without the Ceremony
Build fully type-safe APIs between your TypeScript frontend and backend with tRPC — no code generation, no schemas, no OpenAPI spec maintenance.
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Hono: The Ultra-Fast Web Framework for Edge, Serverless, and Node.js
Hono is a lightweight, high-performance web framework that runs on Cloudflare Workers, Bun, Deno, and Node.js. Learn how it works, when to use it, and why it's replacing Express for many use cases.
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Zod: TypeScript-First Schema Validation for Any Runtime
Zod is the standard for runtime type validation in TypeScript projects. Covers the core API, parsing vs. safeParse, schema composition, and practical patterns for API validation and form handling.
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HTTP Caching Headers and CDN Strategy: A Practical Developer Guide
Learn how Cache-Control, ETag, and Vary headers work, how CDNs use them, and how to configure caching correctly for APIs, static assets, and HTML pages.
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Slidev: Code Your Presentations in Markdown
Slidev lets developers write slides in Markdown with Vue components, syntax-highlighted code, live coding, and built-in presenter mode — all from a single .md file.
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mise: Modern Dev Tools Version Manager
mise (previously rtx) is a fast, polyglot version manager for development tools — Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, Rust, and hundreds more. It replaces nvm, pyenv, rbenv, and asdf with a single faster tool that reads .tool-versions and .mise.toml files.
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shadcn/ui: Copy-Paste Component Library for React and Tailwind
shadcn/ui is not a traditional npm package — it's a collection of beautifully designed, accessible React components you copy into your project and own completely. Here's how to use it effectively.
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Dagger: Programmable CI/CD Pipelines in Code
Dagger lets you write CI/CD pipelines as code in TypeScript, Go, or Python, running identically on your laptop and in CI. Replaces YAML configuration with type-safe, testable pipeline logic that works with any CI provider.
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Cloudflare Workers: Edge Functions for JavaScript Developers
Cloudflare Workers runs JavaScript and TypeScript at the edge in 300+ locations. This guide covers the runtime, KV storage, Durable Objects, Workers AI, local development with Wrangler, and when Workers outperforms traditional servers.
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Tokio: Async Runtime for Rust
Tokio is the de facto async runtime for Rust. This guide covers the Tokio runtime model, spawning tasks, channels for communication, timeouts, select!, and building async servers with Axum or raw TCP listeners.
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commitlint: Enforce Conventional Commit Messages Automatically
commitlint validates Git commit messages against a convention, blocking non-conforming commits at the hook level. Combined with Conventional Commits, it enables automatic changelog generation and semantic versioning.
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Semgrep: Find Real Bugs with Pattern-Based Static Analysis
Semgrep is a fast, open-source static analysis tool that finds security vulnerabilities and bugs using code patterns. Write rules in YAML that match syntax, not just strings.