I’ve been thinking about migrating some of my older personal projects to Next.js, which I’m using on Paradicms. I’ve come to appreciate the ease of development and hosting.

ThingsWorth is an obvious candidate for migration. The project started out ca. 2018 as a set of Markdown files with a similar structure. I created the “real” implementation as a three-tier web application with a Knockout.js front end, Java middleware, MongoDB as a ground-truth database, and ElasticSearch for full-text search. Later I re-implemented the middleware in Scala, as an excuse to learn that better. I also migrated the databases to PostgreSQL with full-text search, because I wanted to learn that. I often do this with personal projects.

In retrospect I wish I’d stuck with Markdown and a simpler web application stack. Most of the web applications I’d built until that point were designed for scale and robustness, with large databases and a lot of moving parts. My default hammer turned out to be overkill for a personal project.

My plan is to migrate the “things” in the current ThingsWorth web application to Jekyll-compatible Markdown on this blog. The posts will show up here, but I’ll also use Next.js to create an interface out of just those “things”. It’s a similar approach to what I’m doing in Paradicms, rendering the same underlying data in different interfaces.