Live data from Hacker News

Next.js is infuriating

blog.meca.sh

331–340 of 602 posts

Re: Next.js is infuriating

#331

I 100% agree. I've ran into the same issues, and I would never use Next.js for anything, and I will encourage every team at work to use something else. In general Next.js has so many layers of abstraction that 99.9999% of projects don't need. And the ones that do are probably better off building a bespoke solution from lower level parts. Next.js is easily the worst technology I've ever used.

What did you use instead?

Hono

Re: Next.js is infuriating

#332
post #329
post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't heard anything about trends, stereotypes, positives, and negatives regarding IT and development in Africa. Following HN's guideline to increase curiosity as topics get more divisive (as this subthread has), and looking for "the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says" I'm going to assume the best: What's the story here? I assume this group was chosen for a reason and didn't meet expectations…

The non-profit works in Africa and is all about using local resources when at all possible. They knew some people that worked with a group out of Nairobi that talked a good game and they liked the people they met and the non-profit folks are NOT technical, they jumped on it. It's a classic story really--I've been on this side of the table many times before with outsourced work. If they had brought me in before hand I…

"We don't know a lot about this, what could go wrong?!" Sigh...

Re: Next.js is infuriating

#333
post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The non-profit works in Africa and is all about using local resources when at all possible. They knew some people that worked with a group out of Nairobi that talked a good game and they liked the people they met and the non-profit folks are NOT technical, they jumped on it. It's a classic story really--I've been on this side of the table many times before with outsourced work. If they had brought me in before hand I…

"We don't know a lot about this, what could go wrong?!" Sigh...

They're sweet well meaning people. They're very familiar with the realities of working in Africa, but they always assume people will try and do the right thing at the end of the day.

Re: Next.js is infuriating

#334
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of the abstractions and nextjs tools do things that my OS does better, cleaner and more predictable too. I suppose the overly complicated ENV/.env loading hierarchy is (partly) needed because Windows doesn't (didn't?) have ENV vars. Same for inotify, port detection, thread management: *nix does it well, consistent ish. But when you want an interface or feature that works on both *nix and windows, in the same way…

Windows has had envvars since before Linux existed. It also has FindFirstChangeNotification (or ReadDirectoryChangesW if you hate yourself) since before inotify existed, etc. Windows has pretty much everything you can dream of (although sometimes in the form of complete abominations), it's just that the people employed by Vercel don't give a shit about using native APIs well, and will map everything towards a UNIX-is…

This seems to ignore the possibility of Windows having done them in a UNIX-ish way to begin with, which would be infinitely better than what Microsoft came up with.

Re: Next.js is infuriating

#335

When I first saw Next.js I was immediatelly reminded of Meteor.js. I did invest a bit in learning into it and did some personal projects. But quickly realized it was both over-abstracted and inflexible which made it really hard to get it past prototypes. But these solutions keep coming up because they bring one thing: Self-contained / "batteries included". Just the other day there was a thread in hackernews about Lar…

> It definitely needs people with more experience to set up everything

I mean it's not just the experience - it's the upfront time cost and then ongoing maintenance.. and for what? It's really easy to underestimate how much effort this will be

Having done both I genuinely think Rails is a 10x productivity boost over stitching your own mishmash of libraries together in Node

The only lack of flexibility you run into is if you really disagree with the fundamentals of the framework. If you hate the ActiveRecord pattern for example you need to stay away

"shit breaks once complexity comes in" is a skill issue

Re: Next.js is infuriating

#337
Maybe this is a good place to ask... but I was actually considering Next.js as a replacement for Gatsby.js project that is a few years old, but is growing at a steady pace. Given all the negative sentiments, what are better alternatives? I don't even use any SSR, or GraphQL capabilities. The main thing I liked about gatsby vs previous "bring your oown library(router)" are: very little configuring, nice dev server, easy to use plugins. It just solved many of the boilerplate tasks for me, and let me get on with react.js components, hooks, etc. I use Django backend for API, and static hosting for the frontend.

Potential alternatives I've found:

  * astro
  * remix
  * back to react-router... and there were multiple back when I used it! :(
Update: after some research, I really Tanstack router approach: https://tanstack.com/start/latest

Re: Next.js is infuriating

#338
Given all of the NextJS hate on here, I feel like I'll get downvoted for saying this...but we run Next.JS, don't host on Vercel - and really don't have many problems at all.

That being said, our app is largely built like a standard React app, we aren't using much server-side-rendering, and we use TanStack Query for loading most data. So, the main value of Next.JS is mostly just the routing and project organization.

Re: Next.js is infuriating

#339

I was about to start a new project with Next.js... is anyone willing to give me some advice? I'm about to start building an e-commerce site (30-50k poster print designs, i.e. no inventory), and was leaning towards a Django backend (because I know it) and... some sort of SSR frontend. I'm not really a frontend guy, but taking this as an opportunity to learn it. This article obviously does not inspire confidence in me…

Personally I love Sveltekit.

Theres some things to learn but once you do its amazingly simple and powerful.

That said I havent tried Astro, Nuxt

Re: Next.js is infuriating

#340
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Third worst if you have used Lotus Notes mail. I still don't understand how an email and calendar client can slow down a computer like that (going by memory, the last time I used it was at work in 2013 so pre-SSD days).

Well... I don't know exactly what the OP meant by "technology", but Notes at least wasn't supposed to be a development platform. It surely was a development platform, but wasn't supposed to be one.

I should have been more specific here indeed. I meant more library or framework, not technology in the broader sense. My apologies.
Post reply on HN