As part of Rise Academy's frontend program, students are grouped and assigned real projects to work on. My group was assigned Bloom After — and our task was to migrate its existing Vanilla JS frontend to Next.js with TypeScript. Not because the old one was broken, but because that's exactly the kind of thing you need to do once on a real codebase before you can say you actually know how. I was the one who set up the new project and made most of the architectural decisions, so this is a first-hand account of how we approached it.
Why We Migrated
Honestly? The legacy frontend still worked. This wasn't a "the codebase is on fire" situation — it was a deliberate learning exercise set by Rise Academy. Bloom After was one of three projects assigned across student groups, and the task was to migrate it to a modern stack. Part of the value of Rise Academy's program is that you work on real projects, not toy examples — so the problems you encounter are real too.
That said, the migration did surface real problems worth solving:
Inconsistent data shapes. Some backend responses used _id, others id. Some used desc, others description. Messy in any codebase, good to clean up.
