[demo] [repo] After finishing the official quick start, I wanted to try Next.js out with an actual project. Soon after I started web programming, I used plain HTML and CSS (and a lot of ChatGPT) to put together a web version of John Selden’s Table Talk. The process took a day or two around new year’s eve and new year’s day. 8 months on and with Next, the process has got a lot smoother.

I was recently invited to try PromptBro’s LLM agent function. While I occasionally use Perplexity.ai for debugging, my exposure to LLM agents was limited to the very amusing Bertie Wooster bot on Poe. The sign-up experience is smooth. One of the first things I tried is the DALL-E integration, and I was impressed by the quality of the image generated. I entered the following text prompt. Give me a tutor who teaches a web dev (who is familiar with the usual tools) how to use the framework Next.

My aim is simple: on my deployed website, when a user enters her email to sign up for something, my website needs to send her a confirmation email, and also log it into a database. So, how to go about it? It is not hard to get a Next.js and Supabase working together on a local machine or when deployed. There is an official tutorial which is good but for a minor flaw.

Much of my day was spent working on a bug described in this SO question. In a narrow sense, it was caused by a careless error: it was a hanging " in one of my environment variables. But in the broader sense, the problem wasn’t the typo. It is my unfamiliarity with Next.js, which made me look and double-check all these areas:- client/server components different .env file settings for each the concept of components itself Next directory structure mailgun create method Had I known the eco-system better, I wouldn’t have looked so widely: the typo would have been spotted sooner.

As related earlier, two projects I am joining uses Next + Supabase, so I need to get up to speed with them. The official Learn Next tutorial felt quite heavy going at first. But now (at Ch.7) I feel it actually strikes quite a good balance between a simple “toy” example and something more substantial. There is quite a lot of pre-requisites. For example, without some familiarity of React, a lot of the materials won’t really make sense.