lenny.is

BIUnify

December 01, 2024

BIUnify

BIUnify is an application built on Bun, Postgres, Hono, and HTMX that lets you upload Excel, CSV, or JSON files and immediately access the data through a standard REST API. In many business environments, spreadsheets are constantly changing, which makes it difficult to keep downstream applications, integrations, or reports up to date. I ran into this problem all the time in my everyday work, so I built BIUnify to solve it.

Use cases:

  • Real-time integrations with BI tools
  • Automating report generation
  • Powering dashboards without manual exports

Although it’s still in beta, BIUnify already works great, and I’ve started getting interest from a few companies.

Why Bun & HTMX?

I chose Bun and HTMX because I wanted to explore lightweight, high-performance frameworks while keeping the web app minimal yet fully functional. During development, I learned a ton about:

  1. Designing efficient, RESTful APIs
  2. Handling file uploads and parsing spreadsheets
  3. Leveraging Hono for routing and middleware
  4. Using HTMX to update the UI without a heavy frontend bundle

Overall, building BIUnify was an amazing experience and I’m excited to keep refining it.