David Bushell migrated a static site generator from Deno to Node and reports a 15% faster build

A one-person tooling choice is usually invisible to everybody else, so the moment somebody writes down what pushed them off is worth reading. David Bushell published a short account on 3 October of moving a static site generator from Deno to Node, with a 15% faster build on Node v26.10.0 after what he describes as a minimum-viable migration. Hacker News had the post at 82 points when it reached the AI News candidate list.

The post is a personal blog, not a benchmark from a company. Bushell runs Valley Fold, his freelance web agency, and the SSG powers his own website and a client site he mentions in passing. He frames the piece as his own experience, not as a general recommendation, and the measurement is one project.

The three specific problems he names

The first is tooling. Bushell says Deno's ZSH integration was broken for weeks on his machine, which is the kind of fault that is small on any single day and tiring across weeks.

The second is JSR, the registry Deno uses. He writes that his builds started hitting 429 Too Many Requests errors from JSR often enough to interrupt work, and he does not say which account tier or request rate triggered the limit.

The third is a runtime bug: he says Deno choked on concurrent HTTP requests in the SSG, which fetches many URLs in parallel to render pages. He does not give the exact Deno version or a minimal reproduction, which the post reads as a known pain in his own project rather than a filed issue.

Together, Bushell writes that he was "shocked to see 15% faster builds" after moving to Node v26.10.0. He does not give the raw build times before and after.

What the migration looked like

The code changes are small. Bushell replaced Deno's file system API with node:fs and swapped Deno.serve for Hono's Node adapter. He writes that "today with Node v26.10.0 I found surprisingly little work to do", and he kept TypeScript, kept the SSG's architecture, and used Hono so the server code did not have to change.

Alongside the migration he lists some of his newer tooling choices. He uses fnm for Node version management and PNPM instead of NPM, and he set minimumReleaseAge: 1440 in PNPM to delay dependency updates by a day. He also mentions self-hosting a Forgejo instance for his repositories.

The piece is a reminder that runtime choices are made for the small reasons as much as the large ones. A tier limit on a package registry, a desktop integration that broke on an update, and one HTTP bug the maintainer could not reproduce are each small on their own. On the same project, over the same month, they are a migration.

Source

• Blog post: Friendship ended with Deno, now Node is my best friend by David Bushell, 3 October 2026