(2023-02-19) Bjarnason Notetaking, Tagged Templates, And How Deno Is A Clear Improvement Over Node

Baldur Bjarnason on Notetaking, Tagged Templates, and How Deno is a Clear Improvement Over Node.js. A while ago, one of my projects (ColophonCards) reached the point where the initial exploratory prototyping had done its job. I’ve figured out an overall technological approach that will be its foundation—and the time came to begin work on its initial version.

I’m a big fan of genre literature... Software has its genres too, and this is an experiment in making a new spin on the notetaking or writing app genre.

I set myself a few guidelines:

The UI would be based on proper research

The final app would first and foremost be a web app

The app would be designed with the real world in mind. And our world is in fundamental decline, at a constant risk of collapse, is built on infrastructure that is decaying and not getting the repairs it needs, and is filled with countries on the verge of fascism. This means the app has to be built with privacy, redundancy, and network resilience in mind.

It would prioritise performance over other concerns

It would prioritise ease of use over popular trends.

I came up with an approach that I think is genuinely new: I combined aspects of distributed version control systems (DVCS) and CRDTs in a way that should work within the capabilities of modern web browsers. I have no idea whether it will be usable in practice

As I said above, this is a research project

I wrote the initial, very rough prototype in Node.

This was a very frustrating experience

Node kind of sucks for writing isomorphic code that’s supposed to run both on the server and in the browser.

For the first dev version that isn’t a proof-of-concept prototype, I wanted to try a new approach that didn’t have the same friction. I considered dropping Typescript entirely.

I then had another look at Deno, tested it out by porting a bit of code, and it turned out to be perfect for this sort of project

All of this is a long way of saying that working with Deno is a joy.