Don't make me think, or why I switched to Rails from JavaScript SPAs

Agree, and to go further (from the point-of-view of an outsider who is forced to do JS occasionally):

* should I use npm or yarn? Why do I see most package authors recommending yarn when npm is the default as far as I know?

* should I introduce Typescript to be able to handle complexity better?

* which module system? I see lots of "require" VS "import", if it needs to work on browser/node.js/deno, which one?!?!

* which test framework? Mocha? Karma? Jest? Cypress?

* should I use a bundler like webpack or just move on to esbuild? Vite? Deno?!?!

It's a nightmare every time I am forced to use JS (usually because of cloud services normally offering JS lambdas and nothing else)...

ASP.NET is great but it definitely comes under the same banner of 'too many choices needed' compared to Rails.

e.g.

Framework - Which .NET framework do you use (Core/LTS)? Do you use MVC, Razor Pages, Web API and Blazor (Server or WebAssembly) or Web API and an alternative JavaScript/TypeScript based frmaework?. Do you use JSON/XML/SOAP or gRPC? How do you serialize your JSON (NewtonSoft.JSON or System.Text.JSON)?

Database - Do you use Dapper, Entity Framework or just utilize a SQLConnection object manually (And then do you use System.Data.SqlClient or Microsoft.Data.SqlClient)? Which database driver do you you use?

Authentication - Do you implement this manually? Do you use something like Identity Framework? Do you use a third party provider like Azure AD(B2C), Auth0 etc. etc.? Do you use header based authentication, JWT's etc. etc?

Jobs - Do you create a separate service project or Windows Service? Do you use HangFire or Quartz?

Email delivery - How do you render your templates? Do you send via SMTP manually or do you use a third party API like Mailgun/Sendgrid etc. etc.

Folder structure - completely up to you, no real standards there.

Testing - Do you use XUnit, NUnit, MSTest, SpecFlow?

Language X is better than language Y is blog posts are incredibly boring. No one actually cares what the author thinks - Rails devs will agree, JS devs will disagree, and no one else will care. But there's a great lesson here nonetheless.

When you're running a startup, and you're at that critical stage after launching when you're trying to get traction, getting people to see you exist is key.

reviewbunny sells a service for developers who want to get an email digest of their pending PRs at the end of the day. The notification emails that Github and Gitlab send aren't particularly clear, and setting up mail rules to mark them as important doesn't work for everyone, especially if you're working on multiple projects at once. So the author set out to make a product to solve that pain point. Writing a controversial blog post has got them to the top of HN's front page, which is awesome, and if the graph at the bottom of the homepage is correct it's won them 2 new organisations and a few new users since the article was posted. Amazing stuff. That's exactly what founders should be doing.

Maybe if it was a little less controversial those numbers would be higher, but there's no way to tell. Nevertheless, this is a fine example of 'content marketing' in my opinion. Well played. And I say that as a JS dev. :)

I've never used Next.js so I decided to take a look. The first step in their Getting Started guide illustrates this pretty well...

  npx create-next-app@latest
  # or
  yarn create next-app

I would choose npx while my friend would choose yarn but there isn't a default or even an indication of why you might like either choice. We kinda just assume everyone already has a preference for npx or yarn.

This is really a Node or JavaScript problem and not an Next.js problem. Not that I have any idea how you might solve it. This is also just a single example and we tend to have these decisions at a lot of steps along the way.

If anyone else is feeling this pain please consider using this template https://cookiecutter-django.readthedocs.io/en/latest/