This spring I tried Next JS and ended up replacing my old Gatsby JS site. Let's run through how I did it.

I had read about and been recommended Next JS as a framework by my friend Erik. I was a little sceptical but I like trying new stuff, and my old site needed some renovation and upgrades in order to work. So I decided to give it a try and replace my old site with Next JS.

First deployment actually finalized within minutes, thanks to the easy integration with Vercel. Moving forward I used Vercel for previewing all PRs, which was really convinient. Previously with Gatsby JS, I used Netlify for preview and deployment, which is a similiar experience.

I used a starter template that had everything I was looking for. The project didn't want to build though, and turns out Contentlayer doesn't work with Next 14. I switched to MDX instead; and here I am, writing this blog post as markdown in VSC. But at least the project builds! Tailwind CSS was also included, which I think is a headache, but since I haven't tried it in any of my projects it's appropriate to learn. Though very bloated with variables...

Thats was a quick run through of my adventures with Next JS. When there's more time, I'll probably re-write the CSS so Tailwind CSS is replaced with something a little less bloated.

Thanks a lot Erik Hemberg for guiding me through this :)