Been lurking here for a while and finally have something worth sharing. Deployed my first real Next.js app to production a few months ago. Not a tutorial project, an actual product with real users.
Here's what surprised me coming from someone with no CS background:
App Router took longer than a weekend to click. Everyone says "just think in server components" but that meant nothing until I broke things enough times to actually understand why. Expect a few weeks of confusion before it feels natural.
Caching will humble you. I had stale data issues that took me days to debug because I didn't understand how aggressive the default fetch caching was. If something is stale and shouldn't be, check your revalidate settings before anything else.
Environment variables across local, preview and production environments caused more headaches than the actual code. Get that setup right early.
Supabase RLS policies are a completely separate skill from building the app itself. I underestimated how long it takes to write policies that actually work the way you think they do.
The deployment on Railway was smoother than I expected honestly. Most of the pain was in the build configuration, not the infra itself.
Happy to answer questions if anyone is building their first real Next.js app and hitting walls.
Otto_The_Dal shares insights from deploying their first real Next.js app to production. They discuss challenges with understanding the App Router, caching issues, managing environment variables, and writing Supabase RLS policies. They also mention a smooth deployment experience on Railway, despite initial build configuration challenges.
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