Ask HN: Comment here about whatever you're passionate about at the moment

I see the panhandle is going to get rather frigid next week. Stay warm if you're up there!

I have been feeling kinna the same about the internet for a while now too, there's so much noise on the internet now its hard to tell if you are talking to a real person with a real interest or someone trying to market something. But luckily, there are a few corners of the internet where you can discover new things.

For example, small reddit communities are still a lot like the old internet, you get to have really different perspective on things you care about in smaller communities. If you can ignore the bad, 4chan's /biz /g and /fit are interesting communities to lurk in.

When I was younger, mmorpg's were the best place to meet REALLY interesting people at, but these days there's not enough time to grind and hang out with people and other people my age don't have enough time to grind. Kinna sad though, but MMORPGS were one of the best things about the internet for me, it helped me learn a lot about making friends from all over the world, helped me meet people with really different interests than me. Trading, organizing/planning and archiving things together with a group of people who started off as total strangers and ended up being like family was a really wonderful experience. ESPECIALLY as an introvert this was one of the best ways I met people when I was younger, and some of them still remain my friends to this day. It was actually mmos that got me in to software development.

As for now, I am passionate about blockchains, I don't really care about how much BTC is right now, or what the price is going to be 10 years from now. But I like the promise of decentralized networks. To me, I find being able to put something up on a system and having the guarantee that it would be there many years later without anyone being able to take it down is a pretty powerful freedom. Yes there are people using this ability for bad/evil but its a technology that's here to stay no matter what anyone feels or thinks about it, and so if I can be atleast one of the people who build something that would help someone in a positive way I can go to sleep happy. Thanks to this passion of my I have met and had the pleasure to work with folks who genuinely care about making systems that benefit others.

Wow, this was long, if you are still here thanks for reading!

Anyways, I picked Next.js and am really liking it so far. It has the right mix of front and backend that is feeling really productive. Server side rendered that gracefully translates into something that can easily be updated client side.

I've got a test site set up pretty quickly, the frontend with react being one way data bound is a super simple data model to understand. TSX gives static typing with html templates which I love. Especially being able to use html in javascript. Components in react are simple to create easy to refactor code into. I've used MUI for controls and my site looks pretty good.

Testing was easy to setup for both the front and back end with jest. I can attach the debugger simultaneously to both the back and frontend code with the same instance of VS Code which is a neat trick. I can share the same TypeScript DTOs with server and client side code super easy. React Query and Axios work great communicating with the server. The hot reloading on save is super nice, I can make a change to front or backend and my site automatically updates while maintaining state.

It is a bit of a house of cards with so many different packages mashed together the chance is high at least one of them is going to be obsoleted. I do like frameworks that are more kitchen sink, that I can rely on for many many years. Part of reason for choosing Next/react is that it seems to be the most active. I really envy code bases in languages that never die - C, SQL, .Net, etc.. I'm definitely one of those people fatigued by the constant churn in our industry and I just want something I can be productive in, build a nice big app on, and won't get the rug pulled out from under me.

Anyways for now I feel like I found it - hopefully it has some good life ahead of it before the next big thing!