Why I Chose Next.js for My Blog (And Why You Might Too)

---

title: "Why I Chose Next.js for My Blog (And Why You Might Too)" description: "After evaluating Astro, Gatsby, and plain HTML — here's why Next.js App Router won for a developer blog in 2024." date: "2024-08-15" tags: ["Next.js", "React", "architecture"]

When you're building a personal blog as a developer, you face a deceptively hard decision. The tech you pick says something about you to every developer and peer who reads your package.json. Let me walk you through exactly how I thought about it.

The Contenders

I spent a weekend seriously evaluating three options:

• Astro — blazing fast, islands architecture, great DX
• Gatsby — battle-tested, rich plugin ecosystem, but feels heavy
• Next.js 14 App Router — familiar React, RSC, edge-ready

Why Next.js Won

Server Components are a superpower

With React Server Components, my MDX parsing, file-system reads, and frontmatter extraction all happen at build time on the server — zero JavaScript sent to the client for those operations. The result: a blog that feels instant.

// This runs only on the server — never ships to the browser
export async function getAllPosts(): Promise<Post[]> {
  const slugs = getPostSlugs()
  return slugs
    .map(getPostBySlug)
    .filter((p): p is Post => p !== null && !p.draft)
    .sort((a, b) => new Date(b.date).getTime() - new Date(a.date).getTime())
}

output: 'standalone' for Docker

Next.js 14 produces a minimal standalone output that copies only what it needs into a Docker image. Combined with multi-stage builds, my final image is under 200MB.

The ecosystem depth matters

When I eventually add comments, search, or a newsletter — there are battle-tested solutions that integrate cleanly with Next.js. With Astro, I'd be piecing things together more manually.

The Trade-off I Accepted

Next.js is more opinionated and has more client-side JavaScript than Astro for a static blog. For a pure content site, Astro wins on raw performance metrics. But I'm a React developer — my blog is also a portfolio of my thinking. Using what I know deeply matters.

Final Verdict

Pick the tool you can ship in. Shipping a polished blog on React beats a half-finished Astro project every time.