Back-end superpower, ElysiaJS

I don't even recall where I first heard about BunJS, maybe it was from daily.dev or from one of the guys in our Whatsapp group Zambian Programmers

I've never been the type to go around hunting for the latest JavaScript tools, but the day I saw that Bun logo and their well designed website, I was captivated! It wasn't long after that til I discovered ElysiaJS. Back then when you search for “Bun JS", Elysia was on the top 5 results.

For years I understood the basic concept of a web server but never really had an interest in the whole "backend" nonsense, my passion was and still is UI and game development, frontend stuff. I always assumed backend was too easy for me to delve into, I mean how hard can it be to sort data and serve it to whoever requests it? I prefer something more challenging 😌.

After several career changes trying to get closer to my dream job of being a game developer, I found myself at a small tech company where I was tasked with designing and developing UI, and integrating applications with the inhouse backend system. It took only a couple of weeks for the new job excitement to wear off as I was constantly bombarded by Error 500’s and invalid schema notifications, this happened so often that I ended up concluding that “this is what working in this industry is all about”, frustrations.

As I now had first hand experience with the famous “backend", I decided to give it a go myself - to see what was so difficult about it, I started off with online backend solutions such as Appwrite (which I instantly fell in love with), Supabase and a tad bit of firebase, from there I learnt more about backend applications that I then challenged myself to build something of my own, to see how far I could go (a challenge 😎), and that is when I took ElysiaJS seriously.

Working with Elysia

That website of theirs was so appealing, good websites always help me to decide early on if I'm going to like the product or not, it's been that way with Maxon’s Cinema 4D website and Blender too, Elysia’s was on point! The documentation was so easy to grasp that I quickly caught on to Elysia’s way of doing things.

Both Bun and Elysia and all their plugins have rapidly improved since I started using them only a year or 2 ago, there isn't that much of a community for Elysia yet but the few people that do use it are quite helpful, thanks to them, Elysia’s discord server, and alot of AI assistance, I managed to build a demo web server using ElysiaJS, BunJS, Postgres, Lucia Auth, and a few other small goodies here and there.

It's been a fantastic journey, along the way I have learnt a lot of things that I only scrolled through in dev blogs such as E2E code testing, VPS hosting, deployment, containerization, orchestration, logging, error handling, real-time communication, cache, event queueing, the list goes on. All this knowledge will make me better at everything else I do, especially developing frontend apps.

It is my plan to blog more about Elysia, the applications I build, and my developer journey in general, whenever I find free time that is. Until then please help make my Elysia template better and ⭐ the repo 🙏