# Two years of Next.js at Artsy: A Retrospective

DevFeed: [Two years of Next.js at Artsy: A Retrospective](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/two-years-of-next-js-at-artsy-a-retrospective-19166.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://artsy.github.io/blog/2024/03/07/nextjs-at-artsy-retrospective/>)

Published: 2024-03-07T00:00:00Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Artsy](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/artsy.md>)

Topics: [Next.js](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/next-js.md>), [Framework](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/framework.md>), [Low-Code / Internal Tools](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/internal-tools.md>), [Front end](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/frontend.md>), [JavaScript](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/javascript.md>), [TypeScript](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/typescript.md>), [Authentication](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/authentication.md>), [Databases](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/databases.md>)

Tags: [authentication](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/authentication.md>), [framework](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/framework.md>), [front-end](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/front-end.md>), [internal-tools](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/internal-tools.md>), [javascript](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/javascript.md>), [next-js](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/next-js.md>), [react](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/react.md>), [typescript](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/typescript.md>)

## AI overview

Artsy recounts two years of using Next.js, including a hackathon proof of concept for deduplicating artist records and a subsequent rebuild of a complex internal tools application. The article credits Next.js's conventions, framework-level setup, and documentation with helping a platform engineering team deliver core functionality, while noting remaining work around authentication and runtime secrets.

## Source excerpt

Where to begin! Where to begin... Lets start with a good measure of success, one that I think most engineers could agree on: a from-scratch rebuild of a complex, internal tools app. Success with rebuilds is often fleeting, as many can attest. There's risk involved. Extending the challenge further, lets assign (most) of the task to a team of platform engineers who aren't too familiar with modern front-end technology - and then say that we succeeded. Is Artsy crazy? Or is Next.js (along with our team 🙂) just that good? Well, it's a little of both. And it's a little bittersweet, in a way. Here's our tale. Beginnings Our first formal use of Next came from a project spun up during Hackathon, two years ago. Hackathon's are great opportunities to push technology forward, and Artsy has had a lot of success with them. We'd been talking about Next.js for a while, and experimenting here and there, but we were never able to find the proper intersection of product and purpose to take things further. With this in mind, one of our Engineers (Roop 👋) spun up a Next.js POC that allowed us to deduplicate artist records. On the surface, the effort was non-trivial. It involved authentication, DB communication, and more. Yet when presented during Hackathon, all of this was done and it also looked beautiful. How could so much product work get completed in such a short period of time? A large part of that is due to Next.js's framework design, and how it simply gets out of the way and allows one to start building product features. The defaults made sense; to create a new route, simply create a new folder or file in the pages directory, and Next takes care of the rest. And what about compilation, TypeScript, linting, and all of the other extraordinarily confusing JavaScript toolchain details that folks typically struggle over? (Most) of the setup was taken care of at the framework level, and the API side of things was light and easy to understand, thanks to great documentation. There are omit