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Ask HN: If you could have your tech team know one new thing

9 points by zemariagp ↗ HN
I'm a FE at a growing e-commerce startup. We have a small but experienced team of engineers. I was asked to present something at our tech meeting (can be anything). If you could make all your colleagues aware of ONE new or less known concept/tool/lesson, what would it be? Could range from one terminal command to a new team methodology...

11 comments

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solardev
Next.js. In 20 years of web dev, this is the single technology that's made me the happiest. It's the reason I chose to specialize in the FE and gave up the backend.

Coupled with a headless CMS (GraphQL is nice but not mandatory), this makes React a dream to work with, the pages super fast, the routing super simple, and the dev ex super fun.

One push to Vercel and you have a fully functional website, no AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, DNS, HTTPS, etc. to configure. It really is magic.

patatino
Which headless CMS do you prefer?
solardev
It depends on your needs, like whether it has to be self hosted, vendor supported, open source, file vs DB backend, enterprise support, easy to use, etc.

We evaluated about 10 or 15 of them and ended up choosing DatoCMS, a small startup with wonderful features and a terrific editing UI and rich plug in system. Their devs were also very responsive. A bunch of small QoL features like built in imgix support and graphql and such sealed the deal for us.

GraphCMS was a close second, with a very strong data model and solid API, but our editors (marketers, not coders) preferred Dato.

There are a lot of good choices out there. The only one we had a bad experience with was the industry leader, Contentful. They were both outrageously expensive (which wasn't the case when they first started) and also didn't really want us as a customer. They wouldn't even seriously meet with us without a NDA.

zemariagp
Yes, it’s a central part of our stack so I guess this one I can’t talk about, thanks anyway!
solardev
Hah, when a technology is so good you can't evangelize it because everyone already uses it...
solardev
I learned about git "worktrees" the other day, which lets you have different branches of the same repo checked out at the same time. So, for example, you could have different node_modules/ folders (one per branch) and not need to reinstall them every time you switched. https://git-scm.com/docs/git-worktree

Sadly, the IntelliJ support for them was very weak (they worked, sort of, but project configurations etc. weren't copied over... it was essentially treated as a different project altogether).

I'm still not 100% sure how it's better than just checking out the same repo in different folders to begin with. But then again most of Git is totally confusing, lol.