Web Development with Next.js and Vercel | Tim Neutkens | Beyond Coding #184

If you're interested in web development, specifically with Next.js and Vercel, this episode is for you. Joining me today is Tim Neutkens. Next.js lead over at Vercel and one of the earliest people to join and start contributing. With over 1 million developers actively using Next.js. A lot of things have changed big time. He shares how things started. What has changed and where it's headed. So enjoy the hard coding. Yeah, it's it's incredible. Like, next year has gotten so huge. I first saw it for me was about six years ago,

and now it's past more than a million developers. That's insane. Yeah. How long ago did you get in touch with the and how you get started with it? So I've been in for sale for almost seven years. And I started contributing to it a year earlier, and so it's almost eight years now. I feel like it's already over eight years now. Because we released it in, October 2016. It wasn't working for us all the time, so I, I just saw it in, like, open source.

Basically, I was involved, and, I never saw a community, for a bit, like, working on other things. So it was, like that multiple, like, open source projects that were relatively popular at the time. Like nothing in the numbers that you see today in open source. But, they had like thousands of, like source on GitHub. Those like pretty big at the time. And I just find it really interesting, like what they were doing and they were building a, like, terminal with WebRTC called hyper. I was contributing to that and, and to like plugins for it.

And like and then basically in the end, like I reached out, to, to PMO, to, to basically say, hey, if you ever want to hire, like anyone, let me know. And, I was like, yeah, we were really small company, like, it was five people at the time, I think, something like that.

And it was like. But let's have a look at this, like, new thing you building. Called Next.js. And I was like, this is pretty interesting. Like, it's, like, I was doing a lot of PHP development at the time, like I was building in, like, WordPress and Magento and, Symphony and like that kind of thing. Yeah. And basically what we did in the end is like, I started interviewing there. Because I find it really interesting, and looks really like a lot like PHP to me, at least at the time.

Like, I was, like, created like pages index and then like, pages indexes are out and it's like very similar to index PHP. And the way that, that works, so was like kind of like if you get like PHP but has a component model, with react, and you can build apps that way, or like I saw with, at least in the application that I was building, this agency, it worked for, like, people were, like,

copying the same code a lot. So they they would either, like this better. Needs to be used here. So I'll just copy the, the HTML and see just for that to, to replace, or like even across apps. Right. Like, that was a, the big thing, like, we reckon the agency, should probably know, like there's a lot of customers, as well. And they, they all have like very at least for UI, it's like very similar needs like always. Buttons, dropdowns, menu bars and like the variance of menu bars, that kind of thing.

But what I saw was that they were, like company I was working for. I was recreating them every time that you start a new customer. And, I was like, this could be better, I think. And, like, with this, react was getting a bit more popular at the time. Like, not everyone knew about it. But at least, like, there, there was, like, some, like, model to do this and, like, I mean, like, in the long run, like, we've seen that, like, UI frameworks are good to say, not just, react, like few and svelte