Dependency rot: why I rewrote this site (again) in Next.js
Back in 2020, global pandemic in full swing and nationwide lockdowns calling off all other commitments, I started a blog. With all my newfound free time I could work on a myriad of interesting projects, follow them up with insightful blog posts, and occasionally maybe even rise to the acclaimed heights of the front page of Hacker News.
So I got to work. I threw away my previous abandoned attempt of a Github Pages Jekyll blog, picked the cool Javascript framework of the day: Gatsby, and created a simple bespoke blog. I wrote my first post detailing writing the site, and shortly after published a second post. This was surely going to be the start of something great.
3 years later...
This post you're reading now is my 3rd blog entry, published over 3 years since the 2nd. What happened? At first: life slowly started going back to normal so I had less free time, and some projects fizzed out disappointingly such that I had little to write about.
But then something else started to happen. Since first publishing the blog dependabot PRs had been coming in one by one. Initially I had the momentum to quickly test and merge the changes, but then laziness took over: after all, how bad can an outdated dependency in a static blog be?
It wasn't long before they started to pile up and when I did have some good ideas I could put down into a blog post, I was greeted with this:
That is already starting to look bad but in reality it's much worse than that - upon looking into the details you can see that dependabot has (understandably) given up on me, and has stopped raising PRs for the 106 total issues it's found:
Dependency rot
So when recently I really did want to write a blog post I had a look at what would be involved in getting everything up to date - and it wasn't a pretty sight:
- 39 direct dependencies
- 2 major React versions behind for React and associated libraries
- 3 Gatsby versions behind, including some major changes on how images should be used
- Various packages completely deprecated and no longer compatible with latest React/Gatsby
In other words, dependency rot had set in. Normally this is something you think about in terms of sprawling legacy code bases, but it was applicable here too: I'd built the entire blog in a weekend, did I really want to spend another weekend fixing dependencies?
Wouldn't it be faster to just rewrite it from scratch?
I'd also not touched (or heard all that much about) Gatsby since first writing the blog. But I had been playing around recently with a little thing which has been getting some industry buzz lately called Next.js. It's even the top suggestion in the "Start a New React Project" guide in the official React docs.
So I recreated my Gatsby blog by loosely following the Next.js tutorial (but using Tailwind CSS and the new app router). This was a much more enjoyable experience than painfully updating all the dependencies on my old site. As Next.js is a little more batteries included than Gatsby, the new site tallies up to a slightly more manageable 19 direct dependencies. And here we are now!
Plans for the future
This time I'm not going to lie to myself and commit to regular posts. But I am going to try to keep on top of keeping everything up to date, so that when in future writing inspiration does hit, I have no excuse not to.
Let's hope my next blog post won't be in 2026 about rewriting this blog in yet another web framework!