LinkedIn Post (Text-Only, Teaser)

I split a monorepo API server into its own standalone process. It was supposed to be simple — point the imports, wire up Express, done.

Three things almost killed it:

• A bare import that Node refused to resolve — ERR_MODULE_NOT_FOUND on the first boot
• An ESM/CJS module boundary that worked inside Next.js but died under plain Node (top-level await, UMD interop, scoped package.json fixes)
• Express Request vs Web API Request — every chat request returned 400 “Invalid JSON body” because the handler expected .json() on the request object

Each fix was small. Finding them took the whole day. The ESM fixes went upstream as a PR.

Result: ~400MB → ~120MB memory. Same SQLite, same combo routing, same provider chains. Just without React, Monaco, and the dashboard UI.

The repo has no history of its own — it exists to consume another repo’s history.

#NodeJS #ESM #Architecture #OpenSource #DeveloperTools

Comment (First Comment)

Full story → https://vianhanif.link/posts/the-server-split-that-almost-didnt-happen/

Notes

• Schedule via Fedica for D+1 (blog/Medium publish day + 1)
• Post text-only (no links in main body)
• CTA: teaser ends with a hook
• Hashtags at the bottom of post body
• Post the comment immediately after publishing post
• Wait 10-15 minutes before engaging with comments
• Publish blog post first, then Medium, then LinkedIn D+1
• Comment links to blog post, not Medium