New Tools / Biome ❤️

While it seems there's a new JS framework or AI toolchain every week, I've become slower in recent years in my adoption of new tech.

For me, this boils down to three reasons.

First, I no longer care as much about the shiny new thing. Usually, I see the tool as a means to an end.

Second, there are so many advantages to using tried-and-true tech. Hiring for that tool and community support are just a couple of reasons.

Third, there's a mental cost in switching, which I find most tools don't justify.

I'd estimate I introduce a new major tool every year or so. In recent years, I've started using Inngest and have switched from Prisma ORM to Drizzle. Otherwise, things have remained pretty consistent: I've been using Next.js and Tailwind for years and have been using React since I first worked with it at Ada in 2016.

So, it always comes as a pleasant surprise when I do find something so good that I make a switch. This week, I discovered Biome, a linter and formatter for JS, and was pretty much sold within five minutes. For years, I've relied on ESLint and Prettier for this—since, well, that's just what we had. But put them beside Biome, and the flaws become glaringly obvious.

First of all, they can be a pain to configure. By default, the linter rules conflict with Prettier, so rules that overlap need to be turned off—usually by using eslint-config-prettier (even more packages!). The config files themselves can also be frustrating to work with. ESLint version 9 brought major breaking changes which, while improvements overall, aren't compatible with much of the existing ESLint ecosystem.

Secondly, these tools are slowww. In big projects, it can take a long time for the linter to run, and in monorepos, you need to create separate run scripts per package to improve caching behavior and run in parallel.

Biome handily outmanoeuvres ESLint and Prettier. Installation was super easy, with a single config file, biome.json, which ships with reasonable defaults.

My favorite part, though, is how fast it is. Biome is built with Rust and runs laps around ESLint. It's so fast that in monorepo projects, you can easily run it from the root across the entire project and still finish substantially faster than ESLint. This also means you end up adding way less configuration boilerplate across your packages. It's just awesome.

At the end of the day, Biome won my support because it's simple, it's fast, and it works. 'Nough said.