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I appreciated Next.js so much that i even made this portfolio website using it, as you can see it has a lot of routing, and got understood the file-based approach better:https://shivam.foo

This was the first time I decided to use Next.js because I had heard a lot about it on the street.

Things that blew my mind:

1. Routing

It amazed me how smartly it uses a file-based approach for defining the routes. Before this I have mainly worked on Single Page Application (SPA) only, to actually make routes, how in react we need to use react-router-dom, or hide/show the page component of the active tab, using external libraries, and my concept became more clear of why React is a library, and why Next.js is a React framework.

2. Don’t need an external server to talk to an API/database.

I don’t actually need an external server in EXPRESS, like I don’t need to define my own api endpoint??? That was so crazy, like everything in just one simple stack, also how easily I can interact with the DB, but before getting too ahead of myself, I decided that instead of doing all of this stuff on my own, I should just use an external API to get data from. But I will work on this as soon as I get a good idea for an app.

3. Caching

Also, the external API in the free tier made me look into types of caching done by Next.js, and how easy it is to implement, how it can revalidate making sure to fetch from the data source, but also having “no-store” cache on the client side component to make sure it fetches fresh data from the server tho.

4. Time to load the page

Also about the server and client-side components to improve the loading speed of the page. How efficiently this can reduce the amount of javascript that is needed to send to the client.

5. Load only what is needed.

Instead of loading all the react components on the page, when routing just load the part of the page which changes, making the transition feel smoother.

6. Deployment

I love you Vercel, don’t need to worry about dockerizing my application, setup a VM, have my domain point towards its IP address. How with the help of cloud functions it can easily scale depending upon load, and I don’t need to worry about that bullshit etc.

7. Documentation

Next.js documentation is very nicely written, very easy to understand the concepts, for the most part.

My only mistake was using TailwindCSS + MUI, for some reason it looks fine in the development, but as soon as in production, MUI overwrites the style.

Seeking full-time SWE roles starting May 2025, please contact me at [email protected] if you have any leads.