I’ve always wanted to have a cool portfolio to showcase my skills and create a space where I can regularly update my side projects and articles, because I love coding and, lately, writing. The main goal when building this was to create a minimalist-designed website with content management functionality.

Some people might consider using Next.js for a web portfolio an overkill, but at the end of the day, we’re here for the fun and the learning 🥳, so I decided to build the app with it. Since the first time I tested the framework to build a small JWT login application, I’ve been curious about what I could create to thoroughly test Next.js's developer experience and features. So far, it has been highly rewarding and smooth to use.

I was surprised at how straightforward it is to create a full-stack app with Next.js, but I'd probably not recommend it for someone who doesn't have experience with React.

The app is mainly divided into two sections:

• 1. The public side of the app, which includes the Bio, Projects, and Articles views.
• 2. The admin side of the app, which allows for Create, Update, and Delete operations on the data.

Regarding the UI, I wanted it to reflect my own style, but at the same time, I didn’t want to take the risk of styling the components from the ground up. So, I went with Chakra UI, an old trusted friend of mine.

For handling backend-database communication and models creation, I used Prisma, which I found great for easy CRUD operations but a little bit awkward for more advanced queries. This may be because it was my first time using it, and I'm more familiar with raw SQL or the built-in Django ORM. Anyway, by the end of the development, I was able to move at a decent speed with it.

I made an error while developing the app that cost me a good amount of time. I was using server actions for GET requests as well, which I later found on Reddit was considered bad practice. So, I had to rebuild the API. Human errors aside, the experience with Next.js was great, and I'm already thinking about the next thing I’m going to build with it 💙.