The Freelance Stack: Real Project with NextJS and Strapi

Why did I take the course?

As part of my learning hours at Siemens, I wanted to take a course that introduced me to Next.js. It's a framework I've heard about but never played with so I felt it'd be fun to get some exposure in it.

How did I feel about it?

The course did a great job of introducing me to the benefits of Next.js, as well as a new headless CMS named Strapi and the mock-up tool named Figma. I didn't like how Coursera insists on you speaking to an AI agent to check your understanding, especially since the model was so much worse than the ones that are currently on the market. There were a lot of times that it felt like I had to make a pointless statement just to get the agent to go to the next part of the script.

I will also highlight that the course felt a bit out of date. It was using an older version of Strapi as well as an older version of SASS. These weren't huge problems since I could quickly read the documentation and explore for newer packages that did what we were trying to do but it would have been nice to get the latest and greatest materials.

What will I do with this?

I'm sort of investigating swapping the backend of this site to use Strapi, as well as potentially rewriting this Portfolio to use Next.js. There's definitely some benefits to prerendering the project pages and making it more server driven rather than client driven.