I wanted to understand the internals of the top UI JavaScript
frameworks, so I started digging into React, Angular and Vue.
Then I discovered Solid and was mesmerized by the beauty and
simplicity of good old... new signals compared to the bloated
approaches of the other frameworks.
For around a week, I was like a zombie: working daily for the company
that helps me put food on the table, and nights for the framework.
What I did
I did everything I liked, including but not limited to:
Balanced OOP combined with functional, because I believe that there is value in both.
Carefully researching and choosing the most used naming conventions.
Enjoying the full freedom of not having to take care of
deprecating or adapting to the restrictions set in stone by old
features.
Finding the sweet spot between API simplicity and developer
freedom. Offering both class constructors and factory functions,
traditional methods accessible via this, and/or
functions when appropriate.
Using the fastest and most modern tools available, such as Vite.
Not being reluctant to use the best AI tools available today.
What came out
At the end of the week, when things finally started to work, I did
my first benchmark and was amazed by how well my little experiment
was scoring, well above top ones in many areas.
That was the moment I decided to take this little toy out of my
closet and give it to the world. Maybe somebody will find it useful!
(I said to myself...)
The Name
The name "Signy" obviously comes from "signals". I wanted
something short, catchy and easy to remember.
Signy was simply the shortest word I could find still available on npmjs.
Finding an unused name with a strong connection to signals was
harder than writing the Signy reactivity signal feature itself!
As a bonus, I discovered that Signý is the name of two heroines
in connected Norse mythology legends. Powerful stories
reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet...
Hagbard's gallows,
a megalithic monument in Halland, Sweden.
Photo: Gunnar Larsson on sv.wikipedia, own work, public domain.
I must say from the beginning: creating this whole framework in a
week without AI would have been impossible a few years ago!
I saw corporate teams working for more than 2 years and not even
coming close to what I did alone with the help of AI in 1 week. And
of course, because I wasn't slowed down at every step by bureaucracy
and management spending a huge amount of time deciding features.
All the GitHub AI instructions and prompt files I used are in the
Signy repository
for full transparency. You can check them out as an example of how
to use AI to build complex projects.
