Is Vercel's Next.js worth the hype? First Impressions.

Since the banishment of the create-react-app and React's site makeover, there are many new React frameworks to choose from, including a lot of hype around the Next.js implementation of the npx create-next-app.

Learning React has been the most confusing programming journey I've encountered. The excessive class component implementation brings enough frustration to redirect a person's career path. However, React found a way to make their implementation more developer-friendly through function components, async thunks, RTK queries, and many library integrations and toolkits.

Working through the Next.js tutorial has led me to this point where I created this very simple yet satisfying blog.

Overall, the tutorial was informative, and it walks you through the basics while introducing layouts, responsive components, automatic image optimization, and some sweet styling integrations such as CSS modules, Tailwind CSS, and styled-jsx. It is challenging to understand the entire concept when you copy and paste the code they provide, but I was left with a "I must learn more" feeling at the end. I even bought this new domain name through Vercel to showcase all my react work in one place, and I love how easy it is to implement websites over other CMSs. Simply connect your GitHub repository and assign it to your domain or subdomain, and every time you push an update to GitHub, it will automatically update your site.

I'm excited about the Next.js pre-rendering, which makes everything load much faster, and hybrid data fetching between Static Generation and Server-side Rendering is an excellent concept. However, what excites me the most is dynamic routing and the ability to implement your own APIs, making adding content to your page simple.