customdiscordrpc VS Next.js

Collaborate with Others: Join developer communities on platforms like GitHub and Discord to collaborate with fellow developers on projects. Participate in hackathons and coding competitions to work with others in a competitive yet supportive environment.

It’s well-established that Discord is a great platform for Developer communities. What’s less established are clear, best practices on how to configure a server from scratch to best serve a community of devs. If you are a community manager or Discord moderator, this blog post aims to give you the definitive guide to getting a working server that will feel welcoming, resourceful, and intuitive for all your community members.

There are no hard and fast rules around this other than remembering to meet your users and contributors where they already are. If you know that they are more likely to hang out on Discord rather than Slack, then having your community channel on Discord is going to serve you well. Some people prefer to keep their communication about a piece of work as close together to the issue and work as possible. One place to have these asynchronous conversations is on the issue itself. There are a few benefits to this:

Discord (https://discord.com/)

Discord is a popular instant messaging application. Originally designed for gamers, it has evolved into a versatile space for communities to connect and collaborate in real-time.

Listening is a skill that we don't practice enough. If you want to think like a consultant, learning to listen is a critical skill. If a consultant solves problems and connects with others to accomplish things for the collective, it only makes sense that gathering the requirements of problems is a highly valuable skill. And while those requirements might be written, most of the variability and detail will come from conversation. This could be an auditory conversation or it could be over a social channel like Discord or Slack. The point is, to think like a consultant, you have to be able to listen to what people are saying so that you can then begin to help solution.

Welcome to our series about building a Discord clone using Next.js and TailwindCSS. In the previous posts, we covered setting up the project and adding the server list. This one will tackle the channel list that will look like this:

Discord is a great example of an enabling platform. After getting started in the gaming industry, it has expanded to other areas as well. Its core value is connecting people and allowing them to hang out, chat, talk, have video conferences, share their screens, and more.

There's an entry in the Application Local Storage in your browser for https://discord.com

Next.js has long cemented itself as one of the front runners in the web framework world for JavaScript/TypeScript projects so we’re going to be using that. More specifically we’re going to be using V14 of Next.js which allows us to use some exciting new features like Server Actions and the App Router.

Web frameworks like Next.js will usually include this feature, but do check that they set the caching headers correctly!

Vite and Next.js are both top 5 modern development framework right now. They are both great depending on your use case so we’ll discuss 4 areas: Architecture, main features, developer experience and production readiness. After learning about these we’ll have a better idea of which one is best for your project.

> It’s important to be aware of what you are getting if you go with React, and what you are getting is a far cry from what a framework would offer, with all the corresponding pros and cons.

Would you like to elaborate on that?

In my experience, with something as great, size/ecosystem-wise as React, there will almost always be at least one "mainstream" package for whatever you might want to do with it, that integrates pretty well. Where a lot of things might come out of the box with a framework, with a library I often find myself just needing to install the "right" package, and from there it's pretty much the same.

For example, using https://angular.io/guide/i18n-overview or installing and using https://react.i18next.com/

Or something like https://angular.io/guide/form-validation out of the box, vs installing and using https://formik.org/

Or perhaps https://angular.io/guide/router vs https://reactrouter.com/en/main

Even adding something that's not there out of the box is pretty much the same, like https://primeng.org/ or https://primereact.org/

React will typically have more fragmentation and therefore also choice, but I don't see those two experiences as that different. Updates and version management/supply chain will inevitably be more of a mess with the library, admittedly.

Now, projects like Next https://nextjs.org/ exist and add what some might regard as the missing pieces and work well if you want something opinionated and with lots of features out of the box, but a lot of those features (like SSR) are actually pretty advanced and not always even necessary.

Next.js: For the website and the admin dashboard

Until the time of writing, there is no official example of how to enable runtime environmental variables in a Dockerized Next.js app, as utilizing unstable_noStore would only dynamically evaluate variables on the server (node.js runtime). There is also an interesting discussion regarding this topic on GitHub.

next.js is a very popular React framework. remix-adonisjs includes more functionality through the AdonisJS backend ecosystem, and should be easier to self-host and self-manage.

Cheryl Murphy is not only a dedicated full-stack web developer skilled in technologies like React, Next.js, and NestJs but also a community-driven professional who recently took on the role of volunteer project team lead at Web Dev Path. With a dual Bachelor's degree in Computing and Chemical Engineering from Monash University, Cheryl’s journey in tech is marked by a passion for building accessible solutions and a commitment to fostering community within tech.

For more information, check out this issue.

Remember to start the Next.js server with pnpm dev.