In 2017, we decided to move away from Backbone and embrace a relatively new tool which was taking the industry by storm, React. Since Backbone was no longer actively maintained and its popularity was falling, it made sense to adopt a tool that was on the rise and promised improved performance, developer experience and delivery speed. In addition, it became easier to hire Frontend Engineers as the talent pool greatly increased. Nowadays, React is the framework of choice across Vinted.

Typescript entered the picture at a later stage. We placed our initial bet on Flow but it soon became obvious that the industry prefers Typescript. In 2019, we migrated to Typescript and never looked back. Having a strongly typed language in our frontend brought confidence to the engineers and greatly reduced the number of bugs.

Next.js is the newest addition to the stack. Vinted is currently a Rails monolith and React on Rails is used to render views. In order to transform Vinted to a single-page application (SPA) and split backend from frontend, we decided to adopt Next.js. Among the options considered, Next.js offered the most comprehensive feature set, good support for Server Side Rendering (SSR) and a vibrant community. We also expect that splitting the client-side would lead to improved developer experience and faster builds.