Issue #619 (Bit Review, JS Utils, Testing, Uncats)05/29/25
The following is a paid product review for bit.dev, an open source solution offering AI-powered development workspaces with composable components, architectural clarity, and zero overhead.
If you're looking to take your application development to a new level, then look no further than this week's featured toolkit: bit.dev.
bit.dev (or simply Bit) helps developers build software by composing components and assembling them into applications. This ensures your applications are scalable, your components are reusable, and you get the benefits of both AI and human interaction.
Bit offers the following features and functionality for developers:
- Modular components – Developers can maintain, version, and share components independently of their Git repositories or project-level build setups, making components easy to update and reused.
- Streamlined dependency configuration – Each component enables auto-dependency detection and smart dependency resolution.
- Ripple CI – Independently test, release and deploy platform changes while ensuring application performance, consistency and safety.
Safely building and updating components with Bit
These are powerful features but you likely want to know how Bit can be used in practice. So let's take a look at some use cases.
Publishing Multiple Packages
Bit enables you to publish multiple packages to the Bit Platform, the npm registry, or any other registry. This allows for numerous benefits, including:
Publishing multiple packages with Bit
See this blog post for more on publishing multiple packages with Bit.
Building Design Systems
With Bit, your team can build composable and extensible design systems that gain visibility and adoption across your organization. The following benefits result from Bit's design system toolkit:
- Independent design components – Components are semantically-versioned, allowing you to pick and choose the components you need with no meaningless dependencies or risky upgrades.
- Auto-generated docs – Bit auto-generates the API reference for every component and provides an incredibly simple way to add custom documentation and previews.
- Easy user/contributor onboarding – Anyone on your team or elsewhere can suggest changes to a component from any project, making your design system easy to maintain and understand.
Bit's design system features
For more on Bit's design system features, see this article in the docs.
Micro Frontends
Bit enables teams to use micro frontends architecture, enabling teams to work independently and deploy changes without affecting other parts of the application. Benefits of micro frontends include:
- Shared components – Teams can work independently while adhering to the same design system with components that are easy to update and maintain.
- Shared development environments – You can maintain consistent development standards across projects, allowing your team to define and share the tools, configurations, and dependencies required to build and test your components.
Micro frontends with Bit
For an introduction to micro frontends with Bit, see this React-specific docs article.
Other Powerful Bit Features
In addition to the above benefits and feature, Bit enables the following:
- Visual editors – Share your UI components with designers and others using visual editors. This allows all to explore components and their variations, and provide feedback using the Bit Platform.
- Shared types, Schema Validators and SDKs – With Bit, everyone can share types, mock data, schema validators, and SDKs asynchronously across projects and teams. This ensures a consistent API, reduces errors, and improves developer experience.
- Microservices – Your team can build composable microservices as Bit Components while sharing and syncing code between services. A component dependency graph helps everyone understand the system and services can be tested in isolation or in the context of the full system.
- Serverless Functions – Teams using bit can build and share serverless functions as Bit components, which enables sharing and syncing code between functions.
A Quick Tour of Bit
When you sign up to use Bit, you'll have access to the full platform with all the above features. For example, you'll have access to your workspaces, which includes a number of workspace starters provided by the Bit team.
Using Workspaces on the Bit platform
You'll also have a single location where you can search for and manage all of your team's components. Your components are filterable and organized by tech stack (React, Angular, Vue, etc.).
Managing components with Bit
The Bit platform also allows you to view analytics for development, delivery, and adoption of your components and design system.
Overall, Bit provides a very powerful and modern way to improve software architecture, code maintenance, and component testing.
So be sure to try Bit today and consider if its comprehensive toolkit is something you and your team can benefit from.
Now on to this week's tools!
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JavaScript Utilities
pretty-bytes — A utility to convert bytes to a human readable string (e.g. 1337 → 1.34 kb), useful for displaying file sizes for humans.
Seyfert — A library for building Discord bots via the Discord API, offering support for scalable applications with unique utilities.
Cap — A lightweight, modern open-source CAPTCHA alternative using SHA-256 proof-of-work that's fast, private, and extremely simple to integrate.
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Protect.js — A TypeScript package for encrypting and decrypting data, where encryption operations happen directly in your app and the ciphertext is stored in your database.
Smooothy — A smooth and fast slider/carousel component that supports infinite scrolling, snapping, touch interactions, and parallax effects.
postal-mime — An email parsing library that runs in browser environments and serverless functions (like Cloudflare Email Workers), taking in a raw email (RFC822 format) and outputting a structured object (headers, recipients, attachments, etc).
Holy Time — A type-safe date/time library with a clean API that includes methods like in(), add(), isWeekend(), between(), duration(), and more.
Enwrap — A tiny (423 bytes gzipped) and dependency-free library that allows you to wrap functions and return typed errors, with a focus on ease of use and developer experience.
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Testing & Debugging Tools
TracePerf — Advanced performance tracking and execution monitoring for Node.js applications, with flexible tracking modes, execution flow visualization, nested function tracking, and lots more.
Beachpatrol — A CLI tool to replace and automate your everyday web browser and can be controlled externally through Playwright scripts.
MetaCheck — A web-based tool to preview how your links will appear across different platforms and social networks (Google, X, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Discord, etc).
Qodo Merge — Chrome extension that allows you to chat with your GitHub pull request code, and get AI-powered reviews, descriptions, and code suggestions. Free for public repositories.
The Morning Paper for Tech — Want a byte-sized version of Hacker News that takes just a few minutes to read? Try TLDR's free daily newsletter. It covers the most interesting tech, startup, and programming stories in just 5 minutes. No sports and no politics. SPONSORED
Errsole — An open-source logger for Node.js apps that comes with a built-in log viewer to view, filter, and search your app logs.
Passkey Garden — A simple playground to explore possible improved branding/UX around biometric passkey (FaceID, TouchID, etc.) authentication for web sites/apps, which works as a living style-guide for passkeys.
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Code PushUp CLI — A CLI to run all kinds of code quality measurements to align your team with company goals.
LogLayer — A modern logging library for JavaScript/TypeScript that routes logs to various logging libraries, cloud providers, files, and OpenTelemetry while providing a fluent API for specifying log messages, metadata, and errors.
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Learn React Beneath the Stars!
Have you ever been to a conference in a planetarium?
Check out React Summit US, the biggest React conference in the US, happening on Nov 18 & 21 in New York & online!
👋 On the lineup: Addy Osmani, Engineering Leader at Google Chrome; Amy Dutton, dev behind hundreds of products; Shaundai Person, Senior Frontend Engineer at Netflix, & more.
Early Bird tickets are selling out fast – don’t miss your chance!
Grab Tour Ticket Now! →
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The Uncategorizables
Typeconf — An open source platform enabling you to make small changes without deploying your app, with tools to define feature flags, prompts, or any experiments right in Typescript.
Open-Launch — A platform to share your project that bills itself as the first complete open source alternative to Product Hunt.
PLUSWHOIS — A WHOIS lookup that goes beyond raw WHOIS data and provides deep insights, including social media profiles, business information, and the technology stack.
Seven Point Sunday — Get 7 ideas to build your career every Sunday. Life hacks, passive income, AI prompts, book/music picks. From Kabir Sehgal, 16x Grammy winner and NYT bestselling author. SPONSORED
Arwaal — A React-like library built from scratch in TypeScript, that functions a an educational implementation of React, built step by step to understand how React actually works under the hood.
jsPad — A powerful and modern playground (like CodePen, JSFiddle, etc.) for writing and testing JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML, and CSS.
Code Timeline Visualizer — A web app that generates colorful visualizations from code inputs, highlighting different segments for improved readability and engagement.
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OpenCtx — A tool for different apps and platforms that lets you see contextual info about code from your dev tools, in your editor and anywhere else you read code.
Sourcebot — An open source Sourcegraph alternative to index all your repos and branches across multiple code hosts (GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Gitea, or Gerrit) and search through them using a fast interface.
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Commercial Apps & Classifieds
LicenseDNS – DNS-based software licensing that verifies, activates and deactivates software licenses.
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Steal My AI Plan – 3 pages, 5 minutes and 90 days to your high impact AI career. Grab yours now! AD 
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Dash0 – An observability platform, powered by open standards, with no lock-in and no black boxes.
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GetScraping – An API that handles proxies, JS, and more to ensure you can scrape without getting blocked.
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Techpresso – A free daily email with the most interesting tech news and insights in 5 min. AD
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Buglab – A "spellcheck for UI" that automatically detect bugs and UI/UX discrepancies.
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GetEles – A front-end assistant Chrome extension that reveals web page info and other details.
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A Social Post for Thought
It's common to assume that someone with a successful startup got "lucky" but, as successful founder Tim Wong indicates, he's had way more failed startups than people might realize.
Send Me Your Tools!
Made something? Reply to this email or send links via Direct Message on X or via chat on Bluesky (details here). No tutorials or articles, please. If you have any suggestions for improvement or corrections, feel free to reply to this email.
Before I Go...
If you enjoy sharing new music suggestions with friends, you'll want to check out Music League. It's a web and mobile app gamifies music discovery, allowing you to compete with your friends on music suggestions while learning new songs and artists.
Thanks to all for subscribing and reading!
Keep tooling,
Louis
webtoolsweekly.com
@LouisLazaris
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