Vercel raise $40M Series B • Hacker News Board

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#181

Post by yawnxyz » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 10:27 PM UTC

chrshawkes wrote: post #169

swyx wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how many times do we need to link to the dropbox comment before HN commenters get it? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

I Don't care. There are tons of examples of building shit on stacks that won't be around. How about investing a shit ton of time into Azure Kubernetes using Docker containers to find out they dropped support, just like this startup can drop out and never be heard of again. Good luck with that.

that seems like the nature of tech stacks, going all the way back to Flash and Dreamweaver... at least with Vercel it's pretty agnostic — I can easily switch a node app from Vercel to Digital Ocean or whatever. Never used Docker before ha, tried to get into it but the install tutorial flow was completely broken :/

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#182

Post by madjam002 » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 10:29 PM UTC

chrisweekly wrote: post #79

naavis wrote: 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.

Parent explicitly mentioned next/image, which is not supported by next export static site generation.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#183

Post by byhemechi » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 10:55 PM UTC

I've using Vercel since 1.0, when it was called ZEIT now. it's amazing, especially for next.js. It's great to see that a lot of other people agree.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#184

Post by PKop » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 11:08 PM 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.

If this view had any basis in reality, and if you really believed it, you would be crazy not to build one yourself (easily) and make boat-loads of cash from all the crazy people paying you for it.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#185

Post by PKop » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 11:09 PM UTC

Grustaf wrote: post #148

paxys wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developers are end users as well

Well, how about “dropbox is aimed at the general population of computer users, and not just computer savvy developers”?

Vercel is aimed at the general population of web developers, not just the savvy ones like you

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#186

Post by byhemechi » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 11:40 PM UTC

flyinglizard wrote: post #17

From first hand experience - Vercel is pretty magical. I’ve helped my wife develop an e-commerce site for her planetary-themed kids merch [1], we chose NextJS with a Shopify Storefront backend and deployed the entire thing to Vercel. Didn’t even need SSL certs, no fiddling with CDNs, it’s just magic. We are super happy with how it turned out vs dealing with full Shopify front end/backend stores. [1] https://littleast…

The website looks excellent but the perf could really do with some work.

After a quick look in the profiler I found that you're eager loading full-res images from shopify, and it's adding quite a bit of time before the page fully paints, with a lot of reflow. I'd recommend lazyloading them after the fact, with a super low res version as a background-image and adding a min-height to the images so that the whole page doesn't reflow as much.

Otherwise a great site and good looking products, If I had kids I'd buy a shirt.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#187

Post by raiyu » Thu, Dec 17, 2020, 12:07 AM UTC

yawnxyz wrote: post #180

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.

I'm a designer w/ some developer experience that uses Vercel for our startup... I'd have no clue how to deploy my own server. And Digital Ocean costs money... Vercel is free for me right now

You can rub static sites for free on DigitalOcean’s new app platform

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#188

Post by manigandham » Thu, Dec 17, 2020, 12:25 AM UTC

adim86 wrote: 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?

It's a PaaS service like Heroku and others. However it's the new generation of "serverless" billing models where you don't worry about instances/nodes/servers at all and pay in much finer-grained increments.

Basically node-js servers running your code with an integrated CDN, but they also support Go, Python and Ruby for running server-side logic.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#189

Post by flyinglizard » Thu, Dec 17, 2020, 12:26 AM UTC

byhemechi wrote: post #186

flyinglizard wrote: post #17

From first hand experience - Vercel is pretty magical. I’ve helped my wife develop an e-commerce site for her planetary-themed kids merch [1], we chose NextJS with a Shopify Storefront backend and deployed the entire thing to Vercel. Didn’t even need SSL certs, no fiddling with CDNs, it’s just magic. We are super happy with how it turned out vs dealing with full Shopify front end/backend stores. [1] https://littleast…

The website looks excellent but the perf could really do with some work. After a quick look in the profiler I found that you're eager loading full-res images from shopify, and it's adding quite a bit of time before the page fully paints, with a lot of reflow. I'd recommend lazyloading them after the fact, with a super low res version as a background-image and adding a min-height to the images so that the whole page d…

Really appreciate the feedback. We’ll try this!

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#190

Post by haltingproblem » Thu, Dec 17, 2020, 2:08 AM UTC

I see a lot of excitement around the product but no idea of what service Vercel provides. Can someone explain (ELI5) or for python/django folks what Vercel does.