Congratulations on the funding Guillermo!
Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A
101–110 of 203 posts
Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me as a noob with very simple requirements, it’s very refreshing not having to care where and how my server code runs. Just add to a repo, push and forget. And if my code is written against some simple HTTP request interface, there shouldn’t be much trouble to move it elsewhere.
I've recently had a simple requirement. To build a site with content gated behind a paywall. There's no way to have SSR'd gated content without paying a gazillion bucks to either netlify or next for role-based redirects. Even if I would go for CSR'd content for the gated part, I'd have to fiddle with JWT tokens. To handle users, I'd have to use a 3rd party service such as oauth, since zeit doesn't support users, and…
Wouldn't WordPress with a couple of plugins solve the content with a paywall problem in about 15 minutes?
I'm not asking that flippantly. And I know there are plenty of reasons not to use WP, so I apologize if this is a dumb question.
It just seems like WP might solve that particular problem for you without much work. And it solves other problems too, like managing users and tracking revision history for every piece of content.
I think Digital Ocean has a one click setup for WordPress. WP isn't my favorite software to work with as a developer, but I use it when it's the right took for the job because for the most part, I've been able to deploy it and forget about it because it has just kept chugging along and getting the job done without any intervention from me.
Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
curious why was the name Zeit not preferred?
[flagged]
Who cares. He was a philosopher and a interesting one. That’s like not reading Ezra Pound’s poetry even though it’s some of the best of all time.
American post-war propaganda did a number on you if you’re that whipped. Nietzsche (another German, oh no!) calls that the slave morality.
Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A
#104What does a rebrand signal? That investors are unhappy and that the founders need to align the brand with the vision...
Or is there a more positive reason to rebrand? I would think you don't rebrand if things are going super well, right?
Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A
#105As someone who has been involved in many branding projects, it is amusing to see all the negative commentary on the rebrand. This is human nature 101. Everyone always hates rebrands. In fact I am willing to bet that the executives who eventually bought into this new name also hated the new name when they heard it. Whenever we presented a new name to a company that wanted to be rebranded, we always asked them not to p…
What value is there in renaming anything? You've said that out that "Google is a stupid and juvenile-sounding name." but you imply it doesn't matter - so what's the point? Isn't rebranding what companies do when they run out of ideas (one of my old employers changed its name at least 3 times because... why? I doubt they have a viable product yet. A name change isn't going to help).
> What value is there in renaming anything? You've said that out that "Google is a stupid and juvenile-sounding name." but you imply it doesn't matter - so what's the point?
To be clear, my sentence was slightly syntactically incorrect: what I meant was, "Google is a stupid- and juvenile-sounding name." It's not a stupid name, but it is stupid-sounding, at least until you get used to it. But it's far from a stupid name. For instance: it's spelled the way it sounds, it's memorable, and it sounds like a verb. Those are all pluses, and yes, they matter.
I once worked for a company called Internet Enterprises. Terrible name. It sounds like a shell company with dusty offices on a service road off a highway.
I once owned a design agency called factor[e] design initiative (I didn't found it or name it). Poor brand story: the "e" was chosen because at the time (late 90s) "e" was like "i" from a few years ago. No other good reason. It was spelled all lower-case, like e. e. cummings (annoying for a company). It had weird punctuation marks in it. And how do you pronounce it? I would commonly hear "factory" or "factor-E" (correct). I used to joke it was "fac-TOR-ay" (say that with an Italian accent).
A few years in, we rebranded to Parallel. Much better: regular spelling and capitalization, dictionary word and a good brand story (alignment / working "in parallel" with clients, etc.) At times, in conversations with clients, they would inadvertently use the brand: "We'd like to work in parallel with you..."
This stuff matters—a lot! It's easier to attract customers and employees with a great brand. And the brand provides a consistent touch point - a "north star" if you will - for what the company stands for.
Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've recently had a simple requirement. To build a site with content gated behind a paywall. There's no way to have SSR'd gated content without paying a gazillion bucks to either netlify or next for role-based redirects. Even if I would go for CSR'd content for the gated part, I'd have to fiddle with JWT tokens. To handle users, I'd have to use a 3rd party service such as oauth, since zeit doesn't support users, and…
Wouldn't WordPress with a couple of plugins solve the content with a paywall problem in about 15 minutes? I'm not asking that flippantly. And I know there are plenty of reasons not to use WP, so I apologize if this is a dumb question. It just seems like WP might solve that particular problem for you without much work. And it solves other problems too, like managing users and tracking revision history for every piece…
I use Wordpress for many clients because it's the simplest solution that also ensure they can find other developers to take over if I'm not there.
Wordpress is a dumpster fire and I hate it with a passion, though. Like, viscerally, almost as much as I dislike Drupal and Joomla. I'd use the term PTSD but that strikes me as insensitive.
But I still use it for many clients, because it's the simplest, easiest solution that other (and crucially, cheap!) developers can take over when I'm not there anymore.
Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A
#107I might be missing something. How does this compare with netlify which I've been using sometime as my 'heroku' for static sites? With that I'm also getting the ability to post-process things, use lambda functions, even get get forms for free (up to a point) which is needed for almost every site. It also provides slick DNS. Has worked wonders with gulp/jekyll/etc builds. This does seem to do all of that with the excep…
Main difference with Vercel / ZEIT is that unlike Netlify, it can more easily have SSR pages.
So like if you're using NextJS for instance, on Netlify you can only really use the static site generation features of NextJS, whereas with Vercel you have SSR pages as well as the API functions.
Also Vercel _can_ do full standard servers if needed, including for NodeJS https://vercel.com/docs/runtimes#advanced-usage/advanced-nod... or Python https://vercel.com/docs/runtimes#advanced-usage/advanced-pyt...
Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A
#108Judging by the comments so far, the name change backlash is of unseen-since-Qwikster proportions…
Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A
#109I gave up on Zeit when Now v2 came out because, besides it being more complex and a pain to migrate to, they went back on their promises about no vendor lock-in. Up until late 2018, their site had a very different philosophy that they abruptly abandoned. [1] [2] Fool me once... 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20181107092845/https://zeit.co/n... 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20181107092845/https://zeit.co/n...
Now v1 was such an awesome abstraction, I was inspired to recreate the CLI on top of Kubernetes, to avoid any vendor lock-in. I also needed v1 capabilities like websocket support that went away with the v2 lambdas. This CLI utility has support for a few major cloud Kubernetes providers.
Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A
#110I gave up on Zeit when Now v2 came out because, besides it being more complex and a pain to migrate to, they went back on their promises about no vendor lock-in. Up until late 2018, their site had a very different philosophy that they abruptly abandoned. [1] [2] Fool me once... 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20181107092845/https://zeit.co/n... 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20181107092845/https://zeit.co/n...
I honestly don't understand this fetishization of "serverless" functions. It leads to so much vendor lock-in, tooling complexity, and straight-up lack of features.
Serverless is just zoomer Common Gateway Interface for venture capitalists