I wanted to build a pastebin when I started learning React and Next.js. I thought this would be a good demonstration of what I’ve learned, with the ability to add features as I get more advanced with React and Next.js. It’s been a little over 6 months since I put the project aside as it ws right around the holidays and my work schedule was absolutely awful at the time.
Fast forward to this week and I have been able to pick it back up, re-familiarize myself with my own work and get a fully functional (albeit very basic) release pushed live! You can check it out at https://pastey.io.
My goal was to incorporate popular (and modern) technology offerings so along with Next.js, I’m using MongoDB Atlas for data storage and Auth0 for user account creation and authentication. Since this was my first real foray into a project that didn’t use MySQL, trying to wrap my brain around Mongo was difficult at first but, at least in my case, I was making it harder than I really needed to because of working exclusively with MySQL for so long. Auth0 has been fairly easy to work with as well and their documentation on intgrating into a Next.js project was a tremendous help. And finally, deploying everything on Vercel was shockingly easy.
Once unfortunate side effect of pausing development on this project is that Next.js 13 was released right as I got too busy to make any meaningful progress. I do need to consider migrating to Next.js 13 before I add too many more features that may not be forward-compatible without a lot of rework and refactoring.
I fully intend to keep Pastey.io operational indefinitely because I do think it’s a useful tool and not just a tech demo. I find myself using paste bins and buckets more frequently in my new role and it seemed fitting that I start using one that I’ve built from scratch. Being a police officer has made me much more paranoid about personal information security and using a tool I built myself means I know excatly what is happening with the information I give it.