Actually, everybody knows that already, like why pay an engineer when you can just use their stuff for free on Github.
In today's blog we're going to cheat off the smart kid's homework and look at some of the coolest open source libraries that you've never heard of. Tools that will make your apps faster, better looking and less expensive to run.
You'll ask yourself how have I not been using that already? and that brings us to library number one:
Here's a problem that anybody who's ever built a website is faced. It's too slow even if you work really hard to create a tiny JavaScript bundle. The product manager will eventually tell you to add a bunch of other chunks like Mixpanel, Intercom and Google analytics. These third-party scripts clog up the main thread and will make your app slow. No matter what luckily there's an open source library called Partytown that can run third party scripts from a web worker. JavaScript is single threaded but modern browsers allow you to run background jobs via web workers. Partytown will offload any scripts that don't deal directly with the UI into a web worker and that means the only thing on the main thread is your UI which leads to a faster more responsive website.
Another problem that every app developer usa b2b leads will need to solve is user authentication. Firebase is great but it's somewhat feature-limited. Auth0 is great but it's expensive and that brings us to Supertokens which is an open source authentication solution. It provides SDK’s for runtimes like Node and Python allowing you to quickly self-host a fully featured authentication system with support for 0auth providers, passwordless login, but most importantly it deals with session management and security.
Pretty cool, but it's got nothing on this next one. Here's a pro tip if you're building an open source library make sure that the readme includes phrases like blazingly fast, bleeding edge, holistic approach and game changing. Because they make your library better the same way putting flame stickers on a car makes it go faster. Many businesses out there need to build their own full text search engine either for internal data or to build a search engine for their customers. You could go with Elasticsearch but it's expensive and complicated. If you want to self-host, there are two very promising open source alternatives. One is Meilisearch implemented in Rust and the other is Zinc implemented in Go. Both provide a fast-simplified way to build your own search engine.
Now, our next library Trcp. It is exceptionally cool but a little harder to explain. If you're building an API today, there are two main approaches REST and GraphQL. I won't go into the differences right now although. But there's another less talked about approach called RPC or remote procedure call and basically, it's just a URL on a server. But unlike REST that corresponds to an entity, it corresponds to a function that you want to run on the server. This approach actually makes a ton of sense for many modern applications. Trcp allows you to build entirely type safe API’s without the need for schemas or code generation like you would with GraphQL. Overall, I think it has the potential to fundamentally simplify the way we build full stack web applications.
