Wow, it has been far too long since I posted here. I started drafting one back in September 2024, but I guess I got distracted and never published it 😅. A lot has changed in my personal life, but I am back! Today, I caught up with where I was on Project Zenith and just took care of some housekeeping tasks.
A phrase I like to repeat to myself is “Less is more”. I think it is common for developers to want to use the latest framework or library. While that is not inherently problematic, it can often lead to leaning too heavily on things that may not gain traction and lose community support quickly. At the same time, it may provide you with a lot of benefits that accelerate development or grant you access to feature sets that were previously unavailable.
I thought that Project Zenith might have been a good opportunity to learn and familiarize with Next.js (https://nextjs.org/) – a “React Framework for the Web”. It looked promising, and had tons of features that seemed valuable for web development. However, as I started to dig deeper I found that there was a lot of new concepts and it is a quite opinionated about project layout among other things.
While I am sure Next.js is a great choice for some projects, I don’t feel a strong enough need to adopt and learn a whole new framework at this time.
There are always tradeoffs, but I am changing my approach and trying to rely more on what I am already familiar with. I feel that this will help me follow through and create a usable application. I am excited to return to this personal project and will dedicate a few hours every Sunday to working on it as my schedule allows.
Until next time!