BigCommerce ❤️ Next.js | A Look Back at Next.js Conf 2023
I’m writing this blog just a few days after speaking at Next.js Conf in San Francisco last Thursday. What an event. First and foremost, I want to give a major shout out to Vercel’s team for not only hosting the event, but asking our team at BigCommerce to speak on the main stage!
We were beyond stoked to get up and talk a little about the tools we’re currently building at BigCommerce, on top of Next.js, that will dramatically improve Developer Experience on our platform.
What did we learn about where Next.js is going?
A huge highlight of Guillermo’s keynote at Next.js Conf was the announcement of Next 14. Here’s what can you expect from Next 14:
- Turbopack, Next.js’s underlying Rust engine that 5,000 integration tests are now passing
- Stable Server Actions
- A Preview of Partial Prerendering
- Next.js Learn
Next.js is in BigCommerce’s DNA — in fact, minutes after Guillermo announced the release of Next.js 14, our engineers were back at our booth working to get Catalyst upgraded to version 14 to begin experimenting with some of the new features. Thanks to how compatible Next.js 13 is with Next.js 14, we were able to upgrade in no more than 20 minutes!— so we’re really excited to see how these updates are leveraged by developers building on and for our platform!
As a Developer Advocate, I think the new Next.js Learn educational tool is stellar. Offering developers a path towards learning with clear, up-to-date materials is one of many keys Vercel is using to unlock the best Developer Experience out there. More frameworks and developers tools should take note!
As Vercel announced new API docs, updated designs and improved search results, it felt great to have the BigCommerce DevEx team feel so on the same page! We’ve also been focusing on leveling up our Developer Center with improved layout, content and search over the past few weeks. Our new & improved Developer Center went live last week!
Check it out here (seen below!) and let us know what you think. We’re building this for you, so any feedback you have is incredibly valued and appreciated!
What did the BigCommerce team talk about?
If you were at the event last week, you might’ve caught myself and Matt Volk, a software engineer from the BigCommerce Headless team, get up and talk about the common pitfalls we see developers face, and the solutions we’re currently building on top of Next.js to help developers solve these common issues.
Common developer hurdles:
- Everyone wants their sites ready faster — especially in e-commerce
- Switching context between multiple GraphQL APIs can be challenging for developers who build for numerous brands
- Composability. Developers and brands have technology preferences they’d like to honor while choosing their e-commerce stack.
What we’re doing to solve those common problems:
- A fully customizable and shareable Component Library, inspired by ShadCN’s core principles (WIP)
- A cache-enabled API client that lowers the barrier to entry for writing GraphQL queries from scratch
3 main takeaways of the conference
1. Community and education are the future of Developer Experience 🤝
Vercel has always had an exemplary approach to Developer Relations and Developer Experience, and the loyalty and excitement within the community they’ve built was contagious. You can have the best idea, product, or platform on earth, but if there’s no community to give you meaningful feedback or bring life to what you’ve built, what is it worth?
Beyond that, if you built the world’s greatest product but nobody knows how to use it — do you really have the world’s best product? Vercel’s announcement about Next.js Learn shows us what’s next in Developer Experience: a focus on developer education. Developers knowing how to use your products is step 0.
We’ve made huge investments in our Developer Community, tools, and resources at BigCommerce over the past two years, and will continue to do so. If we’ve learned anything in these past two years, most recently at Next.js Conf, it’s that communities and education will continue to be at the core of tech brand loyalty.
2. BigCommerce has been making some bets on what the future of our platform is going to look like, and those bets are paying off 🚀
If you’ve been along for the ride with BigCommerce for a while, you might be noticing some shifting winds! This is a good thing. Focusing on Developer Experience, open source, building in public and building tools that allow developers and brands alike to make their own choices, use their own tools and control their own destiny is a direction we’re stoked to be heading in.
3. Give the talk! 🗣️
This was our first time giving a talk to this large of a crowd! With 500+ people in attendance in person, and 10s of thousands of developers attending online.
Imposter syndrome, nerves, The Comparison Game — the list of reasons public speaking at an event like this can feel uncomfortable is long. However, what we realized is that we are building interesting things and we want people to know about them! Shout out to everyone who listened to our talk.
Final thoughts
✨I’m really grateful to work on a team that makes speaking at events like Next.js Conf possible — from the rest of my DevRel team being so hard working to the engineers working on the developer tools we got to be on stage to brag about.
✨I’m really excited for the future of BigCommerceDevs. When I started at BigCommerce a few years ago, I was just beginning my journey in Developer Relations, and so was BigCommerce (who didn’t have an existing DevRel team when I started!). Since then, the focus on Developer Experience has become part of BigCommerce’s DNA.
✨I forgot how mind-blowing San Francisco can be after moving to Denver 5 years ago. Riding home in a driverless car was quite the reminder!
Cheers to Next Conf 2023, and to many more to come! 🚀
