March 2022 Summaries

The latest version of Next.js has introduced several features and improvements that drastically improve application performance and overall developer experience. By upgrading to Next.js 12, developers can take advantage of new features such as getStaticProps, next/image, API Routes, and NextAuth.js, which simplify the development process and streamline the workflow. These features enable serverless demos, efficient image loading, dynamic routes, automatic font optimization, faster builds through SWC, and improved developer experience with built-in TypeScript support and React Fast Refresh. By leveraging these new features, developers can create fast full-stack applications while ensuring backward compatibility and making incremental adoption to new versions possible.

Parachute, a modern lifestyle brand, initially deployed its site on Shopify due to its quick templates and SEO benefits. However, after seven years of rapid growth, the team outgrew the platform's customization options and needed more flexibility without sacrificing SEO. They moved to Next.js for better app architecture options and then to Vercel for development and deployment, enabling significant improvements to their workflow, including automation and preview access. The migration resulted in improved page load times by 60% and gave Parachute the ability to seamlessly integrate its favorite tools, retaining Shopify's headless commerce and pairing Contentful with Vercel's Incremental Static Generation feature.

Monorepos are codebases containing multiple projects, often using different frameworks, in a single unified code repository, offering advantages such as easier updates across packages, collaboration and debugging, local development, and faster builds with remote caching. Turborepo is a high-performance build system designed after massive software engineering organizations' workflows to abstract complex configuration needed for monorepos, providing fast incremental builds with zero-configuration remote caching. By adopting Turborepo, teams can improve developer productivity, reduce time spent on shipping code, and increase consistency across products and features.