Vercel raise $40M Series B • Hacker News Board

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#201

Post by madeofpalk » Thu, Dec 17, 2020, 10:28 AM UTC

thesandlord wrote: post #166

tootie wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think for any commercial site, it's likely cheaper to use a platform like next or nuxt and a CDN rather than choking your build pipeline with static generation. You still get static performance and just offload it to an edge network and CDN costs are racing downwards.

No need to do static generation at build time or fully server-side rendering with Next.js either, you can build static pages at runtime with ISR https://nextjs.org/blog/next-9-5#stable-incremental-static-r... (edit: whoops this was for the parent comment)

"incremental static rendering" is... server-side rendering, at least that's what I meant. Rendering pages on demand for users as they request them, with (optional) invalidation to render it again later.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#202

Post by alevfalse » Thu, Dec 17, 2020, 11:00 AM UTC

chrshawkes wrote: post #34

No offense, I think people are crazy to rely on a stack they can easily make themselves vs. a series B startup. It's not that difficult to build and deploy full stack apps on your own server.

Aah.. how'd I subconsciously know OP's a trumptard? There seems to be a pattern.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#203

Post by Jestar342 » Thu, Dec 17, 2020, 1:18 PM UTC

rbinv wrote: post #41

Jestar342 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Server-concern-less.

I.e. you don't need to concern yourself with provisioning, nor maintaining, a server as that part of the process has been abstracted away from you.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#204

Post by keslert » Thu, Dec 17, 2020, 4:30 PM UTC

RobDukarski wrote: post #193

keslert wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a site ( https://familytreechart.com ) with a similar integration with Shopify but one thing I've never figured out is how to send someone to Shopify's checkout page with a preconfigured cart. It looks like you are managing the cart on the nextjs side. How are you generating the checkout page with the right items? I've resorted to creating a DraftOrder, but those don't allow for discount codes so I also had to…

There are cart permalinks [1] that you could use but depending on how much you want to pre-populate I recommend using the JS Buy SDK. I found it the other day and set up a custom free gift with discount code for a Shopify Plus client. The discount code uses the BOGO but the custom functionality checks the conditions and adds the product(s) to the checkout if it is not already there then applies the discount (the clie…

Thanks for the suggestions! I hadn't seen the cart permalinks before, but that might work well for us.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#205

Post by DrFell » Thu, Dec 17, 2020, 8:52 PM UTC

talolard wrote: post #2

Poor Gatsby. We run a Gatsby site, it was great to setup fast fast fast and has been a pain in the butt ever since. Next, from our limited experimentation, has much better ergonomics and it looks like the company has a stronger grasp on go to market. Crazy how fast that happened

The whole JavaScript SSR/SSG/hybrid app scene is changing too fast to be driven by anything more substantive than trendiness. Reminds me of dot com hysteria.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#206

Post by earthboundkid » Thu, Dec 17, 2020, 9:15 PM UTC

city17 wrote: post #143

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Front end deployment, when done correctly, is already easy. S3 + Cloudfront and done: all your static assets are globally available everywhere with good response times in all major geographic areas.

I switched from S3 + Cloudfront to Vercel, simply because it's even easier.

For being "easy" it actually is quite hard to find documentation on how to run an S3 website with CloudFront "properly". Amazon makes it very confusing to figure out that, e.g., web server mode is different than regular S3 mode. CF itself tries to get you to do the wrong thing. Plus you have to jump through hoops to make your bucket private but still give CF access to it. I was doing that wrong for years. How many multimillion dollar companies wouldn't be relevant if Amazon just fixed their freaking docs?

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#207

Post by leerob » Fri, Dec 18, 2020, 2:31 PM UTC

BryanBeshore wrote: post #165

The one thing I dislike about Vercel is that you need to go all in or nothing with it. Say you have a micro-frontend strategy and would like part of your front-end in next.js; you can't. Overall I really am impressed with Vercel, though. It's been a fun project/company to work with.

I have great news – you can do that!

https://nextjs.org/blog/incremental-adoption

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#208

Post by Rauchg » Fri, Dec 18, 2020, 9:46 PM UTC

chrisweekly wrote: post #171

benatkin wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vercel is the company and the product. Now is the old name of the product. It's been thoroughly re-branded. If you go to now.sh it redirects to a page on vercel.com with no mention of "now". The command-line tool is "vercel", aliased to "vc", and it is configured in vercel.json (no longer now.json). If you go to GitHub and look at the repos containing with "now" in their name, they're archived or deprecated.

Thanks, quite right. (I realized same too late to edit my comment.) FWIW I liked "Zeit" better than "Vercel" (shrug). But preferences aside, I was annoyed that the new redirects for "now.sh" URLs were -- uncharacteristically for a team famous for attention to detail -- mishandled, e.g. breaking a fantastic preso I'd bookmarked (which grauch used in his React Conf 2017 talks) and which I had cause to reference today i…

Hey chrisweekly. "deck.now.sh" we chose to redirect because it had some very so slightly out-of-date information. Thanks for calling this out. The right thing here would be to add a banner to the presentation instead, giving an option to go visit the documentation or newer presentations.