The Next.js Conf Picture That Blew People’s Minds
The image above has taken over the software development internet by storm over the last day. Particularly on Twitter/X, it seems to be about all people are talking about. Just twelve lines of code on a slide and you would have thought it was the craziest thing anyone had ever seen. So why are people freaking out?
The reactions seem to fall into three different groups. Those who think this is the best thing they have ever seen. Those who think people who want this are horrible developers and are coding in an extremely insecure manner. And those undecided people straddling the middle. I will say right off the bat, I don’t have a strong understanding of how this pattern is working under the hood but I have researched it some and looked at what the true experts in this are saying. Let’s take a look at each stance.
Those That Think This is the Greatest Thing Ever
There is definitely a group that gets very excited about this setup. This is a great sign for those developing these features, they seem to have a pulse on what these developers want and they are providing those abilities. This is what we want from language, tool, and framework developers. There are definitely things to like about this.
You can build an end-to-end feature all within one context with extremely low friction. People were excited when isomorphic JavaScript came on the scene where they could use one language for both frontend and backend concerns. This pattern takes that same root desire and pushes it further along the continuum. This pattern blurs the lines of when you are doing frontend or backend work and turns it just into “work”. That is what users care about, what the product does, not what the backend and frontend specifically do.
Those That Think This is a Horrible Idea
Next, we have those who think this is a horrible idea and question the developers who would want this. The first immediate response I see is people mentioning something along the lines of “Wow, that’s some easy SQL injection”. Honestly, this initial reaction is probably a good thing, it means that people have SQL injection at the top of their minds and are looking out for it. As an industry, this is not a bad thing…
![Kyle Carter](data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="40" height="40"><rect fill-opacity="0"/></svg>){kind=small}
