I don't know the situation now, but a while ago there were a lot of pushback using Next.js because it was not easy to use all features if not hosted on Vercel.
We used NextJS on a project hosted on AWS a while ago. We learned quickly it wasn't the best tool for what we wanted to do which is why we stopped using it. But it's an open source project whose purpose is to drive devs to Vercel. It doesn't surprise me that there are some features that work best with Vercel (but it does surprise me that only recently other providers started to need adapters).
Anyway, my point is that no one is forced to use NextJS and if they like NextJS but not Vercel they can always fork it or, apparently write an adapter.
It’s absolutely mind boggling to me that we have gotten to a point that building a web frontend takes longer than compiling the Linux kernel..
As a non-frontend developer mainly observing and touching something here and there, a lot of the things that frontend developers do seem vastly over-engineered.
It’s absolutely mind boggling to me that we have gotten to a point that building a web frontend takes longer than compiling the Linux kernel..
As a non-frontend developer mainly observing and touching something here and there, a lot of the things that frontend developers do seem vastly over-engineered.
Not that backend is any better - microservices everywhere, must scale to Facebook traffic even if we only have 10 customers, etc. Saying this as a backend dev
How are CSS and HTML a mess? Combined, they're an incredibly powerful layout engine that works almost the same across all environments and devices while also featuring easy accessibility.
the biggest problem with html/css is that they are tightly coupled. you can't meaningfully modify a layout with css alone. second biggest problem is "no stricter mode". so even wrong or useless html/css code goes unflagged and is treated as it is normal. CSS is way too powerful.
> you can't meaningfully modify a layout with css alone.
I migrated the landing pages for my app[1] from Nextjs to Astrojs mainly because I was paying Vercel $20 per month for serving static pages(it’s 4 times more than I pay Railway for the Postgres database for the actual app and also 4 times more than I pay Cloudflare for hosting all my apps). I used AI for migrating and it took a few days only as the existing repo was used as “instructions” and it included some upgrade…
Why is everyone so afraid to get a $5/mo Ubuntu/Debian VPS, install nginx and call it a day?
Then you can even run multiple projects off the same server.
I think they just want LLMs to read the docs they began shipping[0] along with the library instead of using their own knowledge. For example, when I used Next.js a few months ago, models kept using cookies() and headers() without await, because that's how older Next.js versions worked, but modern Next.js requires await. I imagine there are more cases like this. [0]: https://nextjs.org/docs/app/guides/ai-agents#how-it…
One rather prominent case would be Tailwind. v4 made breaking changes in the way Tailwind is set up, requiring different packages and syntax. However, if you ask an LLM how to set up Tailwind on your Vite & React app, it will confidently list the setup steps for Tailwind v3, which no longer work. At times I would see people daily asking for help with their broken Tailwind setups, and almost always it was them trying…
This was so unbelievably obnoxious when I first started trying to use Cursor last year at some point. Also because if you tried to not use tailwind the AI would eventually try to force it in anyway. I don’t know how it is nowadays but that was so frustrating and funny at the same time. And! When I setup Tailwind v4 ahead of time, got it working, and told the AI about the v4 changes, it would “correct” it to v3 anyway. Another fun “metric” was to ask an AI how to setup react because it was still recommending create-react-app though nowadays I’m sure it’ll be harder to find any model that still has that in its training set.
I just tried their domains page it took 10.8MB of data and took 2s for the DOM to be ready. page actually took 17s to fully render with multiple shift changes. all to render a domain search bar similar to google home page. https://railway.com/domains
Dear lord. It's actually laggy for me to scroll on that page.
I just tried their domains page it took 10.8MB of data and took 2s for the DOM to be ready. page actually took 17s to fully render with multiple shift changes. all to render a domain search bar similar to google home page. https://railway.com/domains
web dev is a sewer
All my projects are server rendered with jinja/minijinja, bootstrap, jQuery, and htmx when I need a little bit of SPA behavior on forms.
No builds, just static <script src= tags. Very fast and easy. I'll never recommend anything else.
I migrated the landing pages for my app[1] from Nextjs to Astrojs mainly because I was paying Vercel $20 per month for serving static pages(it’s 4 times more than I pay Railway for the Postgres database for the actual app and also 4 times more than I pay Cloudflare for hosting all my apps). I used AI for migrating and it took a few days only as the existing repo was used as “instructions” and it included some upgrade…
Why is everyone so afraid to get a $5/mo Ubuntu/Debian VPS, install nginx and call it a day? Then you can even run multiple projects off the same server.
I just did this over at Hetzner and Claude admins it for me so I don't need to learn the CLI or anything, describe the proxying I want, and it setups up a bunch of small side project pages for me.
I just tried their domains page it took 10.8MB of data and took 2s for the DOM to be ready. page actually took 17s to fully render with multiple shift changes. all to render a domain search bar similar to google home page. https://railway.com/domains
