181–190 of 203 posts
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How will the investors recoup their investment? What are Vercel users going to give up to please your new overlords?
Vercel charges money for a service: https://vercel.com/pricing
As 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…
Here is their front page copy:
"Develop. Preview. Ship. Vercel is the optimal workflow for frontend teams. All-in-one: Static and Jamstack deployment, Serverless Functions, and Global CDN."
This doesn't really say a whole lot.
Then we have these little bits:
"Zero config Works out of the box with any web framework."
Great, but what is it, and what does it do?
"instant static deploys Push to Git and your website is live. Zero configuration required."
So this is starting to make some sense - does this mean this technology will grab my github changes to push specific files to where I've hosted them? They ask me to 'import a project' and yet I have idea what that means.
Here is the 'intro' in docs: [1]
"Vercel is a cloud platform for static sites and Serverless Functions that fits perfectly with your workflow. It enables developers to host Jamstack websites and web services that deploy instantly, scale automatically, and requires no supervision, all with no configuration."
That explains next to nothing.
Terminology like 'Jamstack' is still very new and niche, I suggest outside of certain bubbles, very few people understand what that means, so the site is using language that is foreign to most readers. This is not going to work very well.
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It would be nice to think I'm a little slow, but I don't think I am - I think a large portion of today's marketing and communications is a little rubbish: it fails to explain within any reasonable detail 'what it is, what it does, why I would want it' and provide ultra-basic 'hello world' examples that explain the nature of the system.
This is a problem.
There are new techs released every day, I'm tired of struggling through weird non-explanations of various platforms just to get the basic idea of even what it does, this is something companies should focus on.
I 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.
Only if your chosen vendor designed for that lock-in. Google Cloud Run is serverless that just runs whatever container serving HTTP you throw at it, no "lambda functions" needed.
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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.
> It leads to so much vendor lock-in Only if your chosen vendor designed for that lock-in. Google Cloud Run is serverless that just runs whatever container serving HTTP you throw at it, no "lambda functions" needed.
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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/advance…
But Netlify also has cloud functions, no?
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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…
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Yeah, a rebranding will always sound weird at first. The question is whether the upside is better in the long-term - time will tell. Vercel does sound good (though does sound close to parcel for me and also reads like vermicelli a bit). For "Zeit" I am biased, since I speak German and it translates to "time" (and there's a large circulation newspaper called "Zeit"... well, actually "Die Zeit" which reads funny in Eng…
>For "Zeit" I am biased Biased which way, did you think it was good or bad?
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Yeah, a rebranding will always sound weird at first. The question is whether the upside is better in the long-term - time will tell. Vercel does sound good (though does sound close to parcel for me and also reads like vermicelli a bit). For "Zeit" I am biased, since I speak German and it translates to "time" (and there's a large circulation newspaper called "Zeit"... well, actually "Die Zeit" which reads funny in Eng…
Hmmm, perhaps they had a trademark issue in Germany? That explains a rebrand cleanly. Of course they did.
"As a condition of the settlement, Apple Computer agreed not to enter the music business, and Apple Corps agreed not to enter the computer business."