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Vercel raise $40M Series B

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Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#101
post #67
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The term "serverless", to me, makes as much sense as "No Software" (Salesforce) did back then: none. I do get the point of "you're not managing any actual servers", but still.

"Nacho server" (not your server) also works.

Sounds better than misleading "serverless". Whoever named it as serverless deserves a Nobel price for confusion.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#102
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a developer audience, yes. For a non technical audience, no.

It's square aimed at developers though, so shouldn't be too much of an issue.

It's square aimed at companies who hire developers. They want company money, not developer money. Sure, some developers pay for Vercel's products, but they want big chunks of money that managers approve to expense.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#103

Oh god. Even companies raising $40,000,000 can’t explain what they do: “Vercel combines the best developer experience with an obsessive focus on end-user performance. Our platform enables frontend teams to do their best work.” Nice, inspiring evocative words, but I care to find what the fuck Vercel IS, and this is not an answer. Maybe if I reword the above it will become clear: Vercel lets developers have a really gr…

If you scroll a bit down on their starting page there is

> Vercel is the best place to deploy any frontend app. Start by deploying with zero configuration to our global edge network. Scale dynamically to millions of pages without breaking a sweat.

which seems rather clear to me.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're supposed to use other hosted database vendor or your own database server if you need it. I don't think they offer any database service.

What’s the recommended DB host? Does the Next community have a go to?

I use Heroku; gets the job done and is simple.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#105
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you describe what kind of pain points have you had? I've been building a photo-intensive static personal website lately. I started off with Next.js, but later switched to Gatsby, because so many things just worked out-of-the-box with it. This was especially the case with optimizing and resizing images. For Gatsby there is gatsby-image, which works super well. For Next.js there is next-optimized-images which is…

NextJS supports export for 100% static site generation (like Gatsby). Unlike Gatsby, it _also_ supports a server runtime and SSR, and everything in between. Its magic is the good kind that decomposes into sane primitives. Respectfully, it sounds like you might have needed to spend a little more time with the docs.

It does support static site generation, which I was using it for, but for example next/image requires the backend API server. The case I was referring to was such that defining the exact same function in a component file behaved differently than in a page file, I think. In one case the build failed if I remember correctly, because it was trying to build client-side code but the code referred Node.js stuff.

No need to be aggressive. I don't have anything against Next, I just felt much more comfortable with Gatsby.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#107

Oh god. Even companies raising $40,000,000 can’t explain what they do: “Vercel combines the best developer experience with an obsessive focus on end-user performance. Our platform enables frontend teams to do their best work.” Nice, inspiring evocative words, but I care to find what the fuck Vercel IS, and this is not an answer. Maybe if I reword the above it will become clear: Vercel lets developers have a really gr…

"Vercel is the best place to deploy any frontend app."

One of the first sentences on the home once you read past the heading.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#108
post #9

Hi, serious question what is Vercel? As a developer, what do I use it for? Back-end as a service? Hosting? Database? from reading their homepage several times and looking at their products I still cant tell... can some explain?

Serverless web apps. Using their own Next.js as an example: everything in /pages/ is client app, everything in /api/ is serverless app. Client talks to the /api/ endpoints, /api/ endpoints talk to your domain services. Vercel also provide edge-location hosting and caching.

[deleted]

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#109

I'm a huge fan of vercel, it's saved me a lot of money[1] this year. Their developer experience is incredibly friendly and they've contributed extremely useful libraries to open-source, including micro and next.js. I've had great support experiences for some serious issues like platform bugs. They're in a tough position because the serverless paradigm is still foreign to many people, and many typical project dependen…

Could you talk more about your experience mentioned in [1]? That’s super material in terms of improvement.

He's an employee of Versel. I'm sure he'll have all kinds of "experiences"
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