Blog
Mert Özen's blog posts on software development, backend, frontend, and DevOps.
esbuild: Speed Written in Go, Its API, Plugins and Limits
esbuild is fast because it compiles to native code with Go, spreads work across CPU cores and walks the AST only three times; it bundled all of lodash-es about 22 times faster than webpack, but 9% larger. On the Bookstore widget we use its CLI, JS API, metafile and onResolve/onEnd plugins, and look at its limits in type checking, HMR, HTML and code splitting, and at its place inside the Angular CLI.
Understanding webpack: Entry, Loaders, Plugins, Module Federation and When You Still Need It in 2026
webpack treats every file as a module; loaders transform files right to left and plugins hook into the compilation. 5.112 supports CSS, HTML entries and TypeScript without loaders; Vite has replaced it in new projects, but it is still needed for old Angular builders, Module Federation and large projects tied to custom loaders. On the Bookstore widget we hit the loader-order error, write a manifest plugin and measure splitChunks' minSize limit and the cost of Module Federation.
Why Build Tools Exist: Module Graphs, Transpiling, Bundling, Minification and the Dev Server's Job
A build tool does what the browser cannot do on its own: it resolves imports into a module graph, transpiles TypeScript, drops unused code, bundles and minifies files and gives them content-hashed names. Using Bookstore's book search widget, we look at the 642 requests of bundler-free ESM, the 3-request output from Vite 8, Baseline build targets and the difference between the dev server and a production build, all with real output.