Small Diffs - by Greg Foster
Electron is one of the more notorious tools in the modern developer’s toolbox. If you squint, it’s a cousin to React Native - promising “write once, ship everywhere” - but with far less painful build-and-release overhead than mobile development. Its killer feature is bundling Node.js and Chromium together to create a powerful desktop runtime for web technologies. The official Electron blog recently marked its 10-year anniversary, which is wild considering how deeply it’s permeated developer culture.
By the mid-2020s, we’ve reached a point where most new software starts as a website (with the typical HTML/JS stack) and later expands to desktop for better ergonomics - whether that’s a direct dock icon, easier OS-level integrations, or just a more focused workspace. Tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity followed this pattern, even if they didn’t necessarily jump on Electron. Still, for many teams wanting to quickly bundle an app, Electron offers near-instant cross-platform support plus coveted “web-style” benefits like automatic updates and zero-friction releases.
When our engineering team at Graphite needed a lightweight desktop extension, we also gravitated to Electron in no time - especially once we saw the auto-updater. But I’ve often wondered: for a framework with such dominance, where exactly did it come from? Turns out the answer is somewhat surprising - GitHub created it.
