Hi there! This is Allen, Co-Founder and CPO of Sollective. Since Sollective is built with a tiny all-remote team, we rely on transparency in communication to effectively collaborate. That’s why I’d like to share regular updates about the design and development of our product with our members as well as the community of makers and innovators here on Note.

Our Product team has been very busy preparing to work on the next few months of Sollective against our product roadmap. There are tons of new features, enhancements, and functionality we want to bring to the best freelancers in Japan.

Looking at all our planned features, we realized that what we wanted to achieve for our end users would require a complete refactoring of an enormous amount of our codebase. Since we were going through this effort anyway, we wanted to make sure that our frontend stack was as relevant to what our users want and expect. And of course, we wanted to make sure that our own development experience was good as well.

Migration from Create React App to NextJS

Like many modern web apps, Sollective is built on React. And like many others, we started with the Create-React-App framework to drastically simplify our project and speed up development time during the initial stages of development. However now that Sollective has grown, we’ve decided it was time to switch to a solution that offers us the possibility to deliver a faster, more responsive experience for you.

Why NextJS?

Create-React-App serves web pages to you in a client-side rendered approach. Simply put, your browser loads an HTML file, Javascript files, and then your browser does the work of building and showing the DOM. For slower connections and computers this means long loading times.

We chose to switch to NextJS because it gives us the choice per route to serve any combination of static and dynamic pages: giving us the ability to speed up pages that don’t need real-time information and serve them to you faster.

The Result

After over 10,000 lines of code changed and roughly a months’ research and planning from our tiny 3 person team we were able to release and launch Sollective on NextJS. We haven’t yet implemented all the optimization we could have, but pages on Sollective should be loading approximately ~10-20% faster than before.

Now that we have a fresh base to build new and exciting features, we hope you’ll stick around and see how we’ll make the future of work in Japan freelance friendly, one feature at a time.

Join us as a Freelancer:https://www.sollective.jp/for-freelancers Company in Japan? Sign up to hire amazing freelancers:https://www.sollective.jp/register