I Built a Node.js HTTP Framework Faster Than Fastify From Scratch. Here is How.

I want to preface this by saying I did not set out to build a framework. Nobody wakes up and thinks "today I will reinvent the wheel." But sometimes the wheel is too slow, and sometimes the other wheel is too complicated, and sometimes you just start writing code at 11pm and three months later you have a framework named after cockroaches. This is that story. The Problem I have been building Node.js APIs for a while. For most of that time I used Express. Express is comfortable. It feels like home. It is also, when you actually benchmark it, kind of slow. So I moved to Fastify. Fastify is genuinely fast and the team behind it has done incredible work. But every time I started a new project I found myself spending the first hour reading plugin documentation instead of writing actual code. The fastify-plugin wrapping, the encapsulation model, the schema-based serialization — all of it is powerful, but it has a learning curve that I kept bumping into. I wanted something in between. Fast lik