e18e: Ecosystem Performance (with James Garbutt)

About this episode

James Garbutt discusses the e18e initiative aimed at improving performance in the JavaScript ecosystem.

In this episode of DejaVue, Alex sits down with James Garbutt, open source maintainer and lead of the e18e initiative. James shares his journey from writing web scrapers as a teenager to maintaining critical JavaScript libraries like parse5 or Chokidar and eventually co-creating the ecosystem performance initiative. The conversation is then all around e18e, which aims to improve performance across the JavaScript ecosystem through three pillars: Cleaning up dependency trees Speeding up popular packages Creating lighter alternatives to bloated libraries James explains how the community-driven approach has produced impressive results all across the web development landscape. Learn about real-world examples of performance improvements, including replacement packages like tinyglobby and nano-staged , and discover how to contribute to e18e even if you're new to open source. James shares also insights on balancing between backward compatibility and performance, bundling dependencies, and also shares future plans for e18e in 2025. Enjoy the episode! Our Guest James "43081j" Garbutt e18e Website Bluesky Chapters (00:00) - Welcome to DejaVue (00:34) - Which libraries do you maintain…

People in this episode

Hosts: Alexander Lichter, Michael Thiessen

Guest: James Garbutt

Topics covered

• JavaScript ecosystem
• performance improvement
• open source
• dependency management
• web development

Keywords

• e18e
• JavaScript
• performance
• open source
• dependency trees
• web development
• libraries

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: e18e, parse5, Chokidar, tinyglobby, nano-staged

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