Introduction

Full stack development was easy when I started building stuff on the internet back in 2007-2011.

The casual flow was like this:

  1. Open Photoshop. Cracked one. Yikes.
  2. Design the website. Or open a .psd file that you received from another designer.
  3. Slice it and export the assets.
  4. Write HTML, CSS, and jQuery. Yes, you see it right, I learned jQuery before JavaScript.
  5. Use the template however you want. Make a theme for WordPress or OpenCart, or integrate it into a web app using a framework like CodeIgniter.

Later, I focused more on building HTTP APIs and other backend magic, and all these steps dropped out of my routine. Anyway, occasionally I was still building something that could be called a full stack web application, especially after I learned Laravel. That’s how I got into Vue.js and React. The difference was that I didn’t need to design anything. For example, I could just pick Bootstrap and move on with its elements.

Itching to build web apps again

Late one evening in January 2025, I realized two things:

  1. I want to build web apps again. Not only HTTP APIs for mobile apps.

  2. I had heard so much about Next.js but honestly had no idea how it worked.

So within a few hours, I went through this course: https://nextjs.org/learn

I liked the idea of using JavaScript for everything and avoiding the mental context-switching between JS and PHP. It felt like a recipe for ultimate productivity.

TO BE CONTINUED…