micro VS Next.js

Hi HN

I'm Asim, an engineer and author of the open source project Micro (https://micro.dev). I've been on this forum in various forms since 2009. In that time I've seen a lot of shifts in the technology landscape, participated in a few and even tried to start a company myself (which ended up VC funded). In typical HN fashion, I drank the kool-aid and applied to YC around 8-10 times. I got so far as going to mountain view for an interview but never got in. I played right into the idea of starting a fast growing company and "changing the world" by solving my own problems in the developer ecosystem but somewhere along the way lost sight of the problem I was solving. I think it speaks to my own need to seek validation (in the wrong place) but also the general nature of the ecosystem that became all about the pursuit of more funding, growth, users, etc. It really feels like while there's 70-80% value created, the other 20-30% is doing us a lot of harm. Consumer software has become addictive, corporations are becoming huge profit seeking blackholes that mostly cater to their shareholders and we have yet to see any great alternative to the existing tools and services we're now beholden too.

A couple weeks ago I posted Micro Chat (https://micro.mu) on HN - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36135683. This was my first effort in trying to solve the problems mentioned above. But I don't think it's enough. I think what we're talking about is something much bigger. And it's not going to be solved by open source, federation or a single tool. I'm starting to think we need to build something bigger, an entirely new community led app platform.

So here's my idea. Mu (pronounced mew) is a proposal to build a new community app platform from the ground up. It would address all the problems we seem to mention here about ownership of services, addictive scrolling, profit seeking agendas and do it by empowering a community to crowdfund the creation of an alternative system that focuses on being a utility for the people. It would generally be open source, potentially self hostable, but the larger goal would be to empower a handful of people to host and run the service for everyone else, a built like how Let's Encrypt is run today.

I've thrown this idea around a lot, started many discussions here and even tried to push a few things out but never really gotten anywhere with it. I think part of it is to just, build the smallest piece and see where it goes, hence Micro Chat, but the other part is to gauge the sentiment in the room and see whether we can actually fund something much bigger totally aligned with the community. I'm a huge fan of Google services and the utility they offer, but the nature of technology has veered so far into addiction with scrolling feeds, streaming and social media that I feel there's a need to do something now.

If there's interest, please comment and provide feedback.

Cheers

Hey all

I'm Asim. I'm an engineer who's been hacking on an open source project called Micro for the past eight years (https://micro.dev). In that time I've done a lot of things, all Dev related but ultimately most of my career was spent working on platforms for consumer products. After many attempts I've decided the path forward is to focus on building something that solves my own problem. Micro Chat is a solution to some of the social media problems I've been having.

What I've been looking for most of my life is a community. A place to belong. I scoured the internet for that with strangers. But I think that's wrong. The public forums are also the wrong place to find that connection. What we need to do is focus on smaller communities starting with real connections. We need to strip away a lot of the addictive behaviours and issues created by social media. I think things like hackernews are great because it's very simple text based, with no notification and centers around conversations about topics of interest. I think that's how group chat should also be. The difference here is, I want a place to build small private communities e.g micro communities. Most real groups lose their value beyond a certain size. For me that's around 20 people. As an introvert I really care about strong connections with a handful of people. Unfortunately those real world connections are now spread globally as people moved away and while we have private slacks or WhatsApp grojps to stay in touch it just feels like the wrong setup for that. If anything I want to consolidate it into one place.

Anyway I'm sharing this now to get some feedback. I think the tech and the product will evolve but only by finding out if others feel the same.

https://micro.mu

Happy to help anyone starting up. I raised a couple mil in seed funding for an open source project after bootstrapping for a few years. I'm sure the YC crew would be more helpful but I got rejected by YC like 8 times and took the direct route to funding.

We built this https://M3O.com. It was based on this https://github.com/micro/micro

Just happy to help given my own tough experiences. Pitch deck reviews, intros, etc.

Had similar goals. Started by writing Go interfaces for it with Go Micro - https://go-micro.dev then opted for the platform service model as you mentioned with Micro - https://micro.dev

I think whether it's Dapr, Micro or something else, the platform service model with well defined interfaces is the way to go. I don't think a lot of people get this yet so it's still going to be a few years before it takes off.

What if any is the relationship between https://m3o.com/ and https://micro.dev/ ?

I shared this post in a few developer communities like Hacker News and it was well received. Over the past few years I've been working on an open source project called Micro, an API first development platform and I'm now sharing Micro Services, a catalog of reusable real world Micro services.

https://github.com/vercel/next.js/discussions/27666 One of them said 'renaming folder to uppercase' might cause trouble. git might not recognize case-sensetive changes by default.

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.

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