Happy Little Monoliths is an upcoming ebook covering full stack development directly with Fastify and Vite, avoiding metaframeworks entirely.

The book has been in development since early 2024 but has been delayed to cover the upcoming Fastify 5 and Vite 6 releases. Now Fastify 5 has been released and so has Vite 6 beta, which brings this book closer to completion.

How It All Started

Ever since I made the switch from Python to JavaScript on the backend over half a decade ago, I've been on a neverending journey to find my dream stack.

In the beginning, I fell in love Nuxt stack, and went on to become one of its core contributors up until its 2.14 release four years ago.

That's around when I learned about Fastify, peeking through Matteo Collina's videos on YouTube and his talks about Node.js performance.

Fastify and all the knowledge that inevitably comes with it has made me a better JavaScript developer and helped me improve the quality and efficiency of the applications I was responsible for at the time. I formed an opinion that the Fastify stack is the closest thing the Node.js ecosystem has to the level of reliability I've grown used to in Pythonland, and so far, that opinion hasn't changed.

After Vite was released, I decided to leave the Nuxt core team and I started on a new journey to achieve excellency in Node.js web applications.

Making Node.js fast

I went on to work with Matteo at Nearform back in 2021, where I focused primarily at solving clients' Node.js performance problems.

I then joined NodeSource, a pioneering Node.js APM solution provider, where I kept exercising essentially the same role.

In many instances, the performance issues I debugged boiled down to SSR and the use of bloated do-it-all metaframeworks like Next.js and even my beloved Nuxt, to the point where we'd instantly know what would be the most likely cause of issues when we heard of projects using these tools.

The main problem of course is always SSR, which tends to be computationally expensive and blocks the event loop. When you couple SSR in a monolith also serving API routes, as it was common to do in Nuxt v2, you have a recipe for disaster. When you add to this improper handling of asynchronous operations and their errors, microtask queue saturation and other common Node.js mistakes, the problem becomes even harder to tackle.

My dream stack today

In the end, having fewer moving parts makes the job easier. That's why today I always recommend, when given the option, to use a Fastify server you control, rather than one provided by metaframeworks. By having full control of the server and how routes are rendered, you are much more likely to quickly track down serious performance problems when they happen.

With Fastify's streamlined Vite integration, you still get to have access to modern frontend frameworks and plenty of facilities provided by the Vite ecosystem, in a clean and truly modular fashion.

For me personally, my dream stack today is simply Fastify, Vite and Vue, all of which are covered extensively in this book.

Vite however makes it easy to choose any frontend framework you like, and I also made sure to include React, Svelte and Solid integration examples.

In my current role as Principal Engineer at Feature.fm, I've been dogfooding on this stack throughout the year in a project and many @fastify/vite enhancements are being extracted from this work, which will also be featured in this book.