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My full-time job is working as a front-end web developer for a Next.js project. I’ve been working on the project for close to four years now. If I were able to be the framework choice-maker for the company’s next big project, I would choose anything but Next.js.

Dominik Meca

Next.js Is Infuriating

I don’t know. For me, personally, I don’t want to use Next.js anymore. You might think that this is just a singular issue and I’m overreacting. But there’s bugs and edge cases around every corner. How did they manage to make TypeScript compile slower than Rust? Why make a distinction between code running on client and server and then not give me any tools to take advantage of that? Why? Why? Why?

clover caruso — paper clover

One Year with Next.js App Router — Why We’re Moving On

As I’ve been using Next.js professionally on my employer’s web app, I find the core design of their App Router and React Server Components (RSC) to be extremely frustrating. And it’s not small bugs or that the API is confusing, but large disagreements about the fundamental design decisions that Vercel and the React team made when building it.

Harshal Patil — Medium

Why Next.js Falls Short on Software Engineering

I have reservations against using or recommending Next.js as a general purpose framework for React projects. If I do so, then I feel I am not doing justice to software architecture. I wrote about my challenges 3–4 years ago after adopting it for many products.

What I’ve come across with Next.js is the carelessness when it comes to stability and iterative progress, like the tendency to use React canary code in “stable” releases, that sudden switch to a half-baked app router, the lack of basic web standard support, and a focus on supporting their own infrastructure to the detriment of other hosted options. Vercel’s choices feel hostile to the open source community. Next.js feel fundamentally dated by the choices made by React. React probably made a lot of sense when it was first made; I’ve heard enough horror stories of working on the native DOM to know that I probably would’ve welcomed the idea of React when it first premiered. But in practice I feel like React is just too big for most projects and unnecessarily complex for basic interactivity on a page; it feels like I’m having to worry about both the real DOM and the virtual DOM, especially with the way React Server Components work.

Mayank

React Server Components: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

I debated not publishing this post because of the way the React community has historically handled criticism. It is only recently that I decided it is important to share my thoughts, especially after seeing that much of the existing criticism is either not well-documented or stems from unfamiliarity.

For most projects I think Next.js would not be my first or even second choice. I think smaller and simpler frameworks or tools are a better fit for most projects; few of us really need the type of system that Meta needs for Facebook. Most of the ex-Next.js users seem to be pushing for Vite and Tanstack; I just want something that isn’t Next.js.

Modern-day attempts to reach a consensus on the Bible’s many mysteries just spin off new religions or new denominations. The core Christian community remains moored in its history with a text largely sealed from edits. The Christian Bible clearly needs a new New Testament, another addition that conclusively provides the answers sought and debated for centuries.

🐣 Continue reading “The next New Testament”

In my recent post about the damage of apologetics I highlighted how intellectually dishonest the field of apologists is, and how those who present themselves as such are spreading misinformation and ignorance about theology. I don’t regularly reference on my blog the overwhelming numbers of pastors found guilty of sexually abusing their congregation because it feels to me to be a rather obvious point, but considering the most recent updates about an online apologist I felt the connection to my previous post was too strong to avoid making a reference to the story.

Julie Roys — The Roys Report

Can a Psychopath and Rapist Be Fit for Ministry? A Response to Apologist David Wood

This week, The Roys Report (TRR) published a story about Christian apologist David Wood, who openly admitted he “had sex with” 13- and 15-year-old girls prior to becoming a Christian.

The admission was shocking enough. Making it more egregious was Wood’s seeming lack of remorse or apology.

What a reckoning for the online Christian apologist community. To admit this all came at a surprise requires admitting that they are no closer to the God they seek than those whom they admonish for not being properly informed on biblical matters. To claim divine knowledge of how to handle this situation requires them to apologize for terribly heinous actions in direct conflict with the morals they admonish the others for not following. How interesting that they choose admonishment of others instead of personal introspection! Could this all be a grift by narcissistic influencers seeking subscriber funds? Is this a general indictment of the apologist community and its usefulness for anyone, secular or religious? “By their fruits ye shall know them,” and those fruits seem pretty rotten to me.

The right-wing political takeover of the Christian community had seemingly reached its limits in my childhood, but the internet has proven to be a very promising method of an even deeper level of radicalization. In the midst of this increasingly fascist algorithm-driven atmosphere arose Charlie Kirk. He seemed to find the right mixture of theology and bigotry to tap into this our hyper-polarized political environment, and has helped commandeer a religion that once claimed to be firmly in control of the moral standards for the country to instead sink us all into ever-deepening levels of hatred for one another.

💊 Continue reading “Terminally online Christianity”

Objective truth is neither harmed by questioning nor weakened through investigation. There can be no subject too sacred to be studied. Waiting years to accept that within my mind there were areas deemed too holy to scrutinize left scars of deep anxiety and shame.

📚 Continue reading “The damage caused by apologetics”

I am not impressed with the UI changes that Apple has been leaning toward lately, especially with their latest attempt at making their UI look interesting without doing much to improve it, and perhaps even making it worse for everyone in the process. In other words, they’re repeating the same kinds of mistakes they made in iOS 7, a version that they proudly reference in their presentation of the new interface. Such hubris and ignorance!

Pavel Samsonov — The Product Picnic

Apple’s Liquid Glass is a grim portent for UX

While the original Macintosh human interface guidelines were rich with human factors-derived insights, the Liquid Glass design pattern eschews accessibility for maximum luxury branding. Unlike Material 3, which at least bothered to claim that it was Google’s “most researched” Material update ever, Liquid Glass simply asserts that it is delightful, vibrant, and expressive. Did we want that from interfaces, over for example usable and accessible? I don’t get the sense that Apple asked.

Louie Mantia — LMNT

I’ve Got Better Things To Do Than This, and Yet

Succinctly, I feel sour about Liquid Glass.

Translucent UI is usually a bad idea outside of movies and non-critical game interfaces.

The early moments of joy are fleeting, while the usability issues remain. Windows and Mac have both been down this road before, but I guess a new generation of designers needs to learn the lessons anew. Sigh.

@ID_AA_Carmack (John Carmack) — X

The “Liquid Glass” UI treatment is an accessibility nightmare. What a mistake. Yes, they can improve upon it, but they can’t do much else but improve, since they decided to premiere an obviously unacceptable interface design! They made glaring accessibility mistakes within their WWDC presentation: poor text contrast with the background; shimmering layouts that distract the eye; and too thin text, among other problems I observed. I don’t hesitate to say that this is the type of UI that I would’ve been begging my superiors to not present, at least without a massive caveat displayed everywhere the UI is mentioned. This was not ready to ship, not even at a beta stage. This UI diminishes Apple’s accessibility credentials and damages their reputation within the UI community.

With the latest system update for the Panic Playdate now offering network connectivity, I enthusiastically downloaded the Constellation browser to find out how to get my site included in the list of compatible sites, and I was quickly accepted! Click on the button titled “David Hepworth” in the in-app directory to check it out. It’s just a very small chunk of the site you’re visiting now. I had fun editing the photos to make the compatible with the 1-bit screen.

Oh, also check out the latest news about the Season 2 batch of games — and be sure to watch the update video to see me in the intro!

After experiencing a few instances where someone linked to a user on Mastodon to share a post, I began reconsidering my choice to abandon the platform completely. Sure, I had been forced to relocate my account twice due to instances shutting down, and yes I did remember finding search and discovery processes basically non-existent on the platform, but it’s about the users not the technology, right?

That’s when I remembered Technology Connections, a YouTube content creator who posts to a variety of other social networks including Mastodon. He had expressed his disappointment in the platform and the community before I had left the system, but I wondered if things had changed. I found a post on a Lemmy instance that seemed to prove that the Fediverse continues to be weird in pretty much only the exhausting ways.

I’ll stick to Bluesky for now.

This degrading of our quality of life comes from a lack of historical literacy. We have forgotten how close to disaster we are at any moment; we live on a series of fragile systems upon which our daily life depends and we don’t seem to care. Ignorance of their existence or function leads us to taking certain privileges for granted, forgetting that many people outside our bubble of experience may not share in those advantages and that we too could find ourselves stripped of them within a moment. We have become dependent on these systems to survive; our graves might fail to contain the number of dead should any of these systems fail.

🧭 Continue reading “We forget our place”