Hi, I Am Varun Narayanan

A blog about my experience in IT industry as a full stack developer

About Me

I have been working remotely since late 2022. I started building small projects during the end of my college days, initially trying to create small applications using Python and Django. Even my college project was an HTTP based chat application. Later, I got an internship opportunity at Mindspace through IGNITE, which was an initiative by Kerala Startup Mission. Throughout my career, I have helped customers build their dream products both as a freelancer and through the organizations I've worked with.

Work Life Balance

Working remotely can be exhaustive, grinding a regular 8 hour cycle is monotonous and tedeous, still there are methods through which a person can boost their productivity and keep building side projects, or later become a solopenure or achieving financial independance through a own boss setup (which is a dream of every dev). I have build multiple sideprojects, templates based on different architecture, a plug and play setup for both microservice and monolithic applications including live chat or even a monorepo which makes developing an application easy because the initial setup plays a vital role in DX as well as in furthur development, You could always start from a better code base, over the years I have created multiple tools for setting up a starter template, I have also created a npm package which would spin up a react typescript template which have all the init setup for a moderate to difficult application, do check it out @varunnarayanan01/react.

World Of Biased Opinions

Over the years whenever I try to start a project, I get confused cause I see a lot of biased opinions which can lead to overengineer, slow down your development process or it might seem to be better since a famous developer should be using it and supporting it, but you should choose the right one for you the one that you are familiar with and meets the specific use case or have a valid reason to use it

Confusing While Choosing Packages (next.js)

It can be really confusing while choosing packages there are multiple packages for the same use case and different ways to create apis too

Next.js API Routes - The traditional approach using the /api directory (or /app/api in the App Router)
Server Actions - In the App Router, allowing you to define server-side functions that can be called directly from client components
tRPC - A type-safe API library that works well with Next.js, providing end-to-end typesafety between your frontend and backend
Hono.js - A small, simple, and ultrafast web framework that can be used with Next.js for creating APIs

For Real Time Application In Next.js

Server-Sent Events (SSE) in Next.js API routes

Lightweight one-way communication from server to client Simple to implement without additional services

Socket.IO with Next.js API routes

Create a custom WebSocket server inside an API route Popular and well-documented approach

Next.js with SWR or React Query + Polling

Not truly real-time but can simulate it with short polling intervals Built-in support with Next.js's data fetching patterns

Ably with Next.js SDK

Has specific Next.js support Good documentation for Next.js integration

Supabase Realtime with Next.js

If you're already using Supabase, their real-time features integrate well They have Next.js-specific examples and templates

For Next.js applications specifically, Pusher remains one of the most straightforward options with good documentation and examples. Soketi provides a nearly identical developer experience but with self-hosting benefits. The choice often comes down to whether you want a managed service (Pusher) or prefer to self-host (Soketi) while keeping the same API experience.RetryClaude can make mistakes. Please double-check responses.