Next.JS isn't all that bad.

Though I am primarily a backend/system developer, I have worked with frontend for a long time. Coffeescript, React JS/Native when it was just in beta, Rails, plain HTML/CSS, React when it matured a bit more, etc.

Many a time, my work there had been shooting in the dark, because one (or I) couldn’t easily find the rhyme/reason in some of the things that frontend required.

I have always gotten things done, and to the client’s satisfaction*. But not always to my satisfaction.

And all that started to change with NextJS and the new APIs of react. It is very well structured that my backend mind can also grasp how things work, and program it well (and fast) to my and the client’s satisfaction.

Many speak against NextJS (and I am aware of the drawbacks). But we have a pretty large, well functioning frontend for Talix; all built in NextJS.

We haven’t had any mentionable deployment issues that blocked us. We just have a simple docker based installation and that has worked for the last 2+ years without any big glitch.

Since we (or I) are (am) heavy supporters of typescript, surely all the NextJS projects are in Typescript too.

An additional gift from the Gods is tailwind. CSS had been another painful thing I hated. But with Tailwind, I “understand” even that better.

There are a ton of resources online, but what got me started was/were some of the courses from <https://www.udemy.com/user/robin-lebhar/>

And now, finally with AI assistants in the IDE, I am possibly 20 times more productive than how I was 8 years ago; and I thank NextJS/Typescript/Tailwind/React for that growth.

Footnotes

*With one exception where we had a combination of a Hugo website with login where PHP had to be used to connect to their internal systems, and what not. That one was weird.