An exciting 2021 with a lot of awesome technology
Hi there, ! Happy 2021, you're looking dapper today 🎉!
It's beginning 2021 and it's my first ever newsletter issue sending out, so I'm excited. Also, thank you so much for subscribing to the newsletter, it means a lot to me in this very beginning.
Alrighty, there're some interesting ideas I want to share.
I built a free image generator service for you
Last week, in order to automate distribution of my content, I've built an open-source image generator service that you can deploy for yourself.
GitHub - phuctm97/img: 🌠 Imagegen (image generator) as a Service, built with Next.js and Vercel
🌠 Imagegen (image generator) as a Service, built with Next.js and Vercel - GitHub - phuctm97/img: 🌠 Imagegen (image generator) as a Service, built with Next.js and Vercel
The cool thing about this service is that you can deploy and host it completely for free thanks to Vercel's free plan.
Some interesting learnings that I found while building this:
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There's a 1-year-old company doing very similar things and making $100k ARR. The company offers more templates as well as a template editor for users to create their own templates. So I guess you can fork the repo and build a business then, or if you want to collaborate, don't hesitate to reach out to me!
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Vercel's API is built using AWS Lambda and you can do everything that AWS Lambda supports here, for example, I ran a Chrome headless (virtual, without UI) in Lambda to capture HTML screenshots. I don't know how it runs at all, I just called the API and it just worked so well 🤯.
Node.js technology can be faster and more secure
Next.js is probably the technology that has seen the most adoption last year because of its amazing developer experience. However, because it was built on top of Node.js and Webpack, there are quite a lot of rooms for improvements:
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Node.js is unproductive and insecure, which is why Deno was built.
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Webpack and Node-based tools are very slow compared to what possible if they were written in compile-to-machine languages (Go, Rust, C++). esbuild built in Go is 100x faster than Webpack. swc built in Rust is 20-70x faster than babel.
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ES modules is going mainstream. Since a lot of developers and companies are getting rid of IE11, ES modules become a new possibility. Deploying in ES modules natively allows developers to load and cache code truly on-demand and modular, which can made UX significantly better. Snowpack and Vite are first two tools built for ESM and are seeing a lot of adoptions.
Imagine if there are a Next.js version that was built in a native language:
- 20-100x faster than existing tools.
- ESM native.
- Secure by default, no installation, no
node_modules
. - Support mainstream technologies out-of-the-box (TypeScript, JSX, PostCSS, etc)
It can be game changing!
Alright, that's all I have for this week. Hope you are having a great coming weeks and don't hesitate to reply directly here or on Twitter if you have any question or just want to chat!