16. Pioneers. with Tim Neutkens Next.js lead and co-author

[Music] hi welcome to another episode of the CTO to CTO podcast nextjs has pretty much become a standard framework for react applications wondering how this happened in today's Pioneers episode we speak to Tim nkin the very young yet accomplished next JS lead and co-author among some of the topics p and Tim discuss are how adopting this framework imp imped the hosting platform adoption and vice versa also how they managed to build a

community around nextjs and what cooperation with Google Chrome and Facebook's react team actually looks like let's begin hello everyone in today's interview we are going to talk about the front end Frameworks gem stack and open source I couldn't have a better guess than Tim nokins a lead engineer of the nextjs framework the framework That Grew alongside the gem stack became the the facto standard for react based applications hi team thank you for

accepting my invitation hey thanks for having me how you joined the nextjs team so I found out about nextjs uh shortly after it was released because it was part of the the forell community back then um I had been contributing to hyper which is this um terminal built on web technology so on electron HTML CSS uh and react actually react and Redux um and I've been contributing to that and

then uh for sale announced next year and at the time I was working mostly on like PHP websites uh mostly in Magento actually um so mostly e-commerce oh really yeah um so I worked at this agency that that builts a lot of um gent sites in the Netherlands um and I I found out about next year and I found it pretty interesting so I started contributing to that as well next to conserving to hyper

and um I I basically kept coning to it in my free time uh because I was still working at this agency and then yeah I did that for about a year or so um and eventually like after a few months of contributing um gisho the CEO for sale reached out to me and said like hey like would you be interesting in uh joining

uh for sale to to work on next and some other things uh inside of the company so I was like yeah sure I'll like let's talk about it um so they they flew me out to San Francisco um to basically attend the first uh for conference back then umh and uh I got to meet the team and all that um eventually decided to to not go for it at the time uh I was 19 I believe um which might

sound crazy but I wasn't ready for it yet back then um and when was it uh Team how long ago it was when when you got this offer yeah so this was three years ago um well three and a half years ago or so like um April of 2017 or so um yeah so uh so I basically declined the offer uh which which Stills my s crazy

um but then after a few months of like considering more and more to to nexts in my free time uh so it's basically like working full-time at this agency and then also um I I basically kept contributing to nextjs in my free time like besides that like almost 40 hours per week as well because I was just super into it um yeah so I I kept doing like good first issues helping out the community like all that stuff um and and