Get started with the most dev-friendly framework

Introduction...

There are probably a ton of JavaScript frameworks out there in the wild. So what's new in here? Well, I've been using this platform known as Vercel (you might know it as Zeit) for my Python and NodeJS micro-services. I was mainly good in backend development, and wanted to explore Frontend Development too (I hate CSS though!) The most popular ones on the internet was, as you might have guessed - React.

But I was very intimidated by it! It felt overwhelming. I read a few blogs about React and felt that people did not like Redux, Router, among other things, and how slow the website was in general (as the site is rendered client-side). However, it was still the most popular and used framework.

Coming to the main part!

Now, I was going through my Twitter feed one day, and my feed was filled with a bunch of NextJS tweets (apparently they had released a new version that day). I knew that NextJS was built on React, but I figured, no harm in trying, right? Setting up NextJS was a breeze. And the boilerplate website looked cool too! Furthermore, navigation between different pages was almost instantaneous. I was ecstatic. Adding a new page was just so easy, simply adding hello.jsx to the /pages directory made a route to /hello So simple!

Why Next?

Well, there are a couple of reasons you might want to chose NextJS over other frameworks. Note: I assume that you have some prior knowledge of JavaScript, NodeJS, APIs, and how the Web works in general to truly understand it's benefits from both a developer's and a user's POV.

• Automatic code splitting, file-system based routing, hot code reloading and universal rendering.
• Statically generated and server-rendered React App for blazing fast web performance
• Using Vercel's zero-config deployment & globally distributed to all its edge CDNs (very very powerful!)
• Next.js comes with styled-jsx included, but it also supports CSS-in-JS
• Built in fetch support, hot-reloading, Incremental Static Generation
• TypeScript is fully supported

<aside> 🚀 Next 9.4 is the latest version!

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[WIP]