Let’s address the elephant in the room—or rather, the article: What is the Broke Benefit? And how on earth can being broke be... beneficial?
Well, it turns out that scarcity breeds resourcefulness. When you don’t have the luxury of endless computing power or an unlimited budget, you learn to optimize, prioritize, and innovate in ways you never thought possible.
Take me, for example—a full-stack developer armed with a 4GB RAM Pentium laptop. The only real advantage? An SSD, which I treat like a golden ticket to slightly faster suffering.
The Art of Being Selective
When you’re working with limited resources, every install is a life decision. Before I add any new tool to my stack, I don’t just check if it’s good—I check its size, memory usage, and whether it secretly wants to colonize my RAM.
Did you know that Docker on Windows 11 eats up 2.2GB of RAM just by existing? That’s half my machine’s memory gone, just like that. As for cloud services? AWS and Azure are fascinating concepts—that I admire from a safe financial distance.
The Workarounds Working with Node.js was already a struggle but realizing that it doesn’t compile TypeScript by default (without yet another package) felt like a personal attack. Traditional databases? SQL Server, PostgreSQL? I respect them… from afar. But despite all this, I’ve built multiple apps, websites, and dockerized APIs.
How? By embracing the "Broke Dev Stack"—lean, efficient, and running like a million-dollar tech setup (on a budget of approximately zero).
Here’s my go-to stack: ✅ Next.js on Bun
✅ React Native on Expo on Bun
✅ Express.js on Bun
✅ Google Cloud Run
✅ Firebase Realtime Database
✅ Podman
If you’re wondering why I keep mentioning Bun—it’s because Bun saved me.
Bun is an all-in-one JavaScript runtime & toolkit designed for speed, complete with a bundler, test runner, and Node.js-compatible package manager. Bun aims for 100% Node.js compatibility.
Let's create a simple project using The Broke Dev Stack