Hey folks,

I recently stumbled upon a requirement: A blog/portfolio website for all my content creation activities. I wanted it to be a one stop destination for all my content.

Purpose

Basically, there are the different places where I create content:

• My Youtube channel, where I create animated tech videos.
• This dev.to blog where you are reading the current article.

  Article No Longer Available

• My twitter account where I create sketchnotes related to Javascript.

Product Requirement

The product requirement was simple - A home page where users would land and get a summary/dashboard of the best content from all the 3 places mentioned above. And then a side-menu where they can naviagte between a detailed list of all of these.

Technical Requirement

My tech requirement was different. I have been working with react for quite some time now but this time around, I thought to experiment with SSR (Server side rendering). I wanted to experience the power of pre-rendering and also get advantage of the SEO that comes along with SSR. I know that gatsby and next were two of the most famous ways to accomplish the above.

tl;dr - I checked out next.JS first and fell in love with it (Still haven't looked at Gatsby). 😛

Next.JS - What I was looking for

So what did I find in next.js?

I found exactly what I was looking for:

• I would still code my SSR blog with react! ❤️
• The pre-rendered pages
• automatic routing based on file paths (how aweosme is that!)
• Sass support
• Zero configuration deployment with vercel!

It was all too good to be true. I was able to push the first build of my blog (rather a raw build) to production in about 2 hours in total from the point of creating the repo. And the cherry on top: vercel even provides you a free .now.sh domain!

I'll still hold off from sharing the first build of my blog as it is still a work in progress. But the experience so far has been flawless! fingers crossed. 🤞🏽

Kudos team vercel!
Cheers!