Introduction to Architecting an Extensible Digital Garden with Next.js, Tailwind and Nx

Juri Strumpflohner: [0:00] Hey and welcome to my course about developing an extensible digital garden. This is a fancy term, but a digital garden is nothing else than your site, your public website, where you share your knowledge.

[0:13] Digital garden encourages you to publish as soon as possible, so your small note, your small experiment, and over time, it encourages you to come back and evolve those notes, those experiments, to maybe a more fully fledged article. Even the small note themselves might be reused for someone else to start and get going.

[0:33] It's really about the knowledge sharing because, during that phase of knowledge sharing, what you obviously need to do is, you need to acquire the knowledge. You need to process it. You need to adjust it for yourself. Then you also need to represent it for others to be enjoyable to read. A digital garden helps you strengthen your knowledge in this process.

[0:53] In this course, we're not focusing too much on the concept of a digital garden itself. What I would like to do is to help you build the technical foundations on how you build your own platform, where you can then host your digital garden.

[1:07] In this course, what we are going to do is, we are going to use a variety of technologies, first of all, Next.js.

[1:13] Next.js is cool because a digital garden or developer portfolio site or blog usually is just a set of static files, which you might want for Markdown to compile to HTML and then serve on some static hosting provider. That's what my current blog is all about.

[1:29] The cool part about Next.js is, first of all, it focuses on performance, but it also doesn't close me the door to further extend it in the future. For instance, Jon Meyers has a very cool course on egghead about building your SaaS with Next.js and Supabase.

[1:43] It will be a breeze to integrate it into the digital garden which we're going to create in this course. You can always extend it in the future. Then there's Tailwind. This is my safety net to make sure my blog platform or my digital garden looks decent.

[2:00] I like very much nice designs, and I have a good feeling about what is a nice and cool-looking design and whatnot, but I'm definitely not a designer. Tailwind helps me there.

[2:11] Finally, there's Nx. Nx is our development tool, which you're going to use to develop this platform. It has powerful mechanism for not only creating new Next.js applications, serving them, but it will also allow us to integrate third-party tools very easily, such as Storybook or Cypress.

[2:30] As we go and develop this platform, finally, at the end, we are obviously also going to preview and ship it. One thing I would like to have you take out of this course by the end is that while we are developing a digital garden, so a personal portfolio site, if you want, which is not mission critical.

[2:51] Over the course, you will see that you will acquire a set of technologies, such as Next.js, Tailwind, Storybook, Cypress, but then also using, for instance, Nx to develop a small mono repo and see the challenges and the kind of thought that goes into structuring such a mono repo.

[3:08] These set of technologies will easily transfer also to your next professional project, even to your Enterprise project. I hope you enjoy this course, and definitely let me know how you like it or if you have questions on Twitter or on my personal site, juri.dev. Enjoy.