Here’s how I began the process of setting up the project, starting with initial configurations and organizing components

If you missed the previous post 🔗 here, I talked about the overview and flow of the application.

FRONTEND

The Next.js docs are a bit of a maze, with lots of moving parts. I've picked up a few things, but honestly, I'm scratching my head over a bunch of stuff too.

Things that I have learned from documentation till now

• Routing: Next.js simplifies routing by automatically generating routes according to the project's file structure.

• Built-in CSS: Next.js offers support for diverse CSS approaches, such as CSS modules, CSS-in-JS libraries, and global CSS, providing flexibility in styling options.

• Nested Layouts: In Next.js, we can arrange components like building blocks, stacking them up in layers to create fancy UI structures.

Things that I got confused with

• Server and client components
• Static Site Generation (SSG), Server-Side Rendering (SSR), and Client-Side Rendering (CSR)

Right now, I'm a bit clueless about the stuff I mentioned above (SSG, SSR, CSR). But i'll dive into those topics in a future blog post when I've got a better handle on them!

BACKEND

As for the backend, I kicked off by setting up a local MongoDB database, built a simple Express and Node server, and crafted some REST APIs for basic CRUD operations, just to keep the ball rolling.

Since I'm familiar with Express and MongoDB, everything has been going smoothly so far.