I’ve been a Luddite. What’s your favorite part of Next.js?
I stared with basic web dev eight years ago and quickly found React. Four years ago I went down a YouTube rabbit hole about ‘performance’ and found myself in the ‘web developers suck’ camp for the next three years. A year ago I decided to ‘do web development right’ by using Rust for everything and React for nothing because JavaScript is bad. Ask me how many things I’ve built that people use?
The point is I watched part of Theo’s stream today and something clicked. Maybe my prefrontal cortex has finally come online now that I’m pushing thirty years old but I just don’t have the time or energy to reinvent every damn wheel. There are too many things I want to build.
So I’m binge-reading Next.js docs and want to know what all of your favorite parts of Next.js (and vercel) are? And thanks Theo for calling me out indirectly on my bullshit.
3 Replies
SSG (server side generation), meaning if pages always have the same static props in their components, then those pages are rendered at build time 👍
More generally, I like how next.js and Theo’s t3 stack come with reasonable defaults for web development, allowing me to focus on development instead of choosing a tech stack.
How easy Next.js makes communication between backend and frontend.
When creating many prototypes, i like that in next.js i don't need to create APIs, share types between the backend and frontend, have proper fetching logic etc. i just want a simple app that can fetch and send data to backend. Next.js makes that really especially now with server components and stuff
That is nice. I spun up a t3 app last night and looking through the code I was impressed with how much sense things made.
There is a part of my brain that really does not like 'black box wizardry' and demands to know the ins and outs of everything all the way down. Though I have high suspicions that this has been a core productivity killer for me. I am curious to see where letting go of that inclination will take me.