Next.js 11.1, SWR 1.0, oh my! (#32)

Marcus Stenbeck

Marcus Stenbeck / September 07, 2021

3 min read

After two weeks off work, I'm excited to jump back into content creation. Lots of major life events (belated honeymoon, moving into a new home) allowed me time to step away from work and refocus.

I can't be the only one seeing a massive influx of "Web 3" content on my Twitter feed, right? It seems folks have hit the jackpot creating NFTs, causing a gold rush to begin. While I'm cautiously pessimistic of this wave, I've been diving deeper to understand what the hype is all about. I'm working on a blog post - let me know if you're in the crypto space and want to share insights.

I'm seeing a wave of platforms (site builders, SaaS products, and more) being built on Vercel and Next.js. Super takes a Notion page and outputs a beautiful site with incredible performance. They're growing rapidly, serving 100 million pages this month alone and just passed 500K ARR. Hashnode, a developer blogging platform, recently migrated its entire custom infrastructure over to Vercel and Next.js. Site builders like Makeswift, Typedream, Motif, and more are enabling anyone to publish their next project. I mean, look at these templates from Motif and Super 😍

Updates

  • Learn how I migrated my Next.js website to use MySQL with PlanetScale, resulting in 10x faster response times for my APIs.
  • I made a new video on Fauna + Next.js, showing how to fetch data from a GraphQL API with Next.js and then deploy to the edge with Vercel.
  • I wrote a Twitter thread about using databases in Edge & Serverless environments. I'm working on turning this into a longer blog post – let me know if you'd like to provide feedback on an early draft.
  • I updated my site to Next.js 11.1, switched to built-in ESM support for ESM-only packages, and also switched to mdx-bundler for 40% faster builds.
  • I switched from Buttondown to Revue. Buttondown is nice (writing emails in Markdown is helpful) but $30/month isn't worth my infrequent email updates. With Twitter acquiring Revue and adding the ability to subscribe to newsletters directly from your profile, I'm giving Revue a shot. If you want to learn more, Chris has a nice article here.

Next.js Update

  • Next.js 11.1 was released with ES Modules support, performance improvements, Rust-based tooling for faster builds coming soon, 2x faster data fetching when pre-rendering, and more.
  • SWR 1.0 was released with a 41% smaller core, 52% smaller installation size, improved SSR and SSG features, middleware support, custom cache providers, and more.
  • We've released new documentation on testing, including examples for usage with Jest, React Testing Library, and Cypress.
  • A new RFC was published for Global CSS Imports, allowing dependencies (node_modules) to import .css files that are not CSS Modules.
  • A new RFC was published for Crawler-Aware ISR Fallback, allowing web crawlers to server-render ISR pages using fallback: true, while still serving the previous behavior of the fallback state to non-crawler User-Agents.
  • We hosted a Next.js AMA with the DevRel Team, where we answered questions from the community.

Bookmarks