Next.js is infuriating

Similar experience here.

Next.js is 8 years old and still under-documented, and you will still get lost if you veer off the beaten path - of which sometimes there is none.

Frankly, I was mad at myself for not recognizing the hubris and their ignorance of web dev history when I noticed that they brought back directory based path convention from the 90s. That should’ve been the red flag that stopped me but I fell for Vercel’s fonts and web design.

Investing in an implicit and inflexible routing pattern such directory based routing that was used when we didn’t have nice things is like being a rich hippie. Oh it doesn’t stop there. Isn’t it cool that you get to (jk, you HAVE TO) name your files like ‘[path-that-takes-arg].tsx’? You may think that I used brackets as a placeholder signifier, but I didn’t! Brackets are part of the filename and they indicate that this route takes params.

Look, we all tried and maybe had a little too much fun inventing and sometimes reinventing clever patterns we shouldn’t have, but few of us doubled down and just ran with it for so long.

Luckily, you can get around the pattern above pretty easily by just using the one route as a router file and adding your own indirection. Obviously you miss out a bit on tree-shaking and probably some other optimizations they designed to rely on their implicit conventions but your codebase remains greppable.

Second worst for me. I’ve used Sharepoint.

In my opinion (9 years FE exp) you should build your ecommerce site in shopify or wordpress + woocommerce or some other off the shelf tool. It will be up before the evening's out and you won't be spending that much extra than you would have anyway, and everything will Just Work (tm) and look pretty good (chuck out 50$ for a nice wordpress theme and you're golden).

If you insist on rolling your own, Django + templates should be plenty. Lots of existing code for integrating Stripe or whatever. AI will be fine at it. You could potentially investigate medusajs or prestashop. Here's a list that could be fun to investigate: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted?tab... but keyword is fun. You should build it in wordpress because that is a bombproof solution running like half the internet and will save you endless amount of time.

If you're doing this as an exercise to learn a new tool, leave the AI to the side as you're robbing yourself an opportunity to delve into docs and gain more domain knowledge. And absolutely do not touch nextjs with a 10 foot pole, it's an absurdly overwrought tool. The only people that should learn nextjs are people working at dev houses that churn out a shitload of full stack apps for clients that have the budget to shell out for vercel's hosting costs. And even then imo they should just be using django + react + vite + tanstack MAYBE.

HTMX is cool but I'm not sure the point, again if for fun why not, but I would ask yourself: you get your site up and running and you spend the next year scrambling around putting things in boxes and printing shipping labels, and then in 2026 Thanksgiving right before the holiday rush something breaks in your app and you want to fix it but HTMX/nextjs/whatever have gone through 2 breaking change upgrades and so have 4 different libraries they rely on and actually the most up to date version of two libraries you rely on are not interoperable right now because they depend on different node versions or some other bullshit, and now what do you do?

Just use wordpress.

AsyncLocalStorage.enterWith is the wrong method; .enterWith changes the logger for across the *synchronous* execution. This doesn't matter if there's only one request happening at time-- like when you're testing locally. But that's why it didn't work on the actual project.

Use .run.

  return LoggerStorage.run(requestLogger(), () => {
      logger()?.debug({ url: request.url }, "Started processing request!");
      return NextResponse.next();
  });

I feel like I'm being gaslit every time nextjs is discussed. I picked it up and learned it for a couple different projects because clients heard about it and wanted it. I kept finding shit like this in the OP post, making issues, asking around about it, and being told by nextjs experts that I was Doing Everything Wrong. Fine, I'll deploy on vercel, but wait this client wants to try cloudflare edge because he knows the ceo and wants to pitch for his investment firm having better access or whatever tf, so I need to get it running on that, so now I can't use some xyz version of some library, and I have to use some bleeding edge version of nextjs and... etc.

Every day that went by I wondered if I was going insane for thinking we should just go back to building apps in straight vanilla javascript. Or like, just react SPAs pointing at fastapi apps deployed on s3, which has never failed me.