Vercel raise $40M Series B • Hacker News Board

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#21

Post by kylehotchkiss » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 2:01 PM UTC

Many congrats Vercel! I've been a big fan since Zeit platform version 1 - I remember the transition to platform version 2 was difficult but over time I can see how incredible of a platform you've become.

Just a note from a fan - I hope you all can determine a way to approach the future with longevity and corporate independence. The web really needs your entire teams dedication towards performance, end user experience, and developer experience in the coming years. I would love to see Vercel as an independent entity a decade from now and witness how your philosophy changes the web in that time!

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#22

Post by Pandabob » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 2:02 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…

I've been wondering about this exact combo for a while. Your site looks nice.

Any gotchas when using Shopify as just the backend? Did you use the Nextjs e-commerce starter template?

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#23

Post by juliann1 » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 2:03 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…

Hey thats a really nice website! congrats :)

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#24

Post by BossingAround » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 2:03 PM UTC

> Airbnb’s engineering team, for example, isn’t a heavy user of Next.js yet, but they are a world-class team of designers, engineers, product managers, and marketers.

This is a semantically null sentence for the purposes of your article. Skip it and you'd have the same meaning without sounding like you're sucking up to a company.

> Hashicorp pushed back on the dogmatism of pure static. Their team is laser-focused on the user experience. They don’t care if an application is CSR, SSR, SSG, etc. as long as their end-user is delighted.

This has no meaning to me, personally. If Hashicorp doesn't care about pure static as long as their "end-user is delighted," why did they push back? Was there some kind of drama you're revealing? How is "end-user delight" related to any of the acronyms? Are you suggesting pure static pages "delight" fewer users?

The writing is pretty bad. Funnily enough, on the webpage they link from the "CSR, SSR, SSG" string doesn't contain the words "CSR" or "SSG", so it doesn't explain much unless you have the time to read the whole page.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#25

Post by naavis » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 2:04 PM UTC

jack_riminton wrote: post #14

jariel wrote: post #3

Vercel communications team: I watched your quasi-live streaming presentation/announcement several weeks ago, and could barely fathom what anyone was talking about. Was it your intention to completely talk over everyone's head by using arcane or invented abstractions? Trying to make investors feel they are onto something really advanced? Or just caught up in VC/SV speak? Because products that nobody understands have a…

I would also appreciate an explanation of what it is because after 10 mins on their site I still can't pin it down

The front-page is pretty unclear, but if you open the documentation page, it is fairly clear: https://vercel.com/docs

> 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.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#26

Post by leetrout » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 2:05 PM UTC

nobody0 wrote: post #5

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

Can relate, next.js is more progressive while Gatsby get things done so quick at first, but you find yourself in a dark room of settings, let along GraphQL.

This happened to me. And the graphql proponents that know gql love it but it’s so slow to build.

I love Hugo and I wish there was a middle ground that was more approachable. I might have to try next.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#27

Post by yboris » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 2:07 PM UTC

Shout out to Vercel (formerly Zeit) for their awesome Hyper terminal https://hyper.is/

I love Vercel - it runs several of my Gatsby sites and an Angular website for free. It also builds out my PRs so I can see how the website is changed. If ever I need to use their paid tier, I'll do it.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#28

Post by CyberRabbi » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 2:07 PM 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?

I had the same question. I’m an experienced developer and I could not figure out the substance of what this product offers from a glance at its front page.

It vaguely seemed like a replacement for react but it’s hard to believe you could raise $40M for that so something else must be going on. I generally was under the impression that the industry was moving away from client side rendering since it’s so slow. At least I browse the web with JavaScript off by default.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#29

Post by tnolet » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 2:09 PM UTC

leetrout wrote: post #26

nobody0 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can relate, next.js is more progressive while Gatsby get things done so quick at first, but you find yourself in a dark room of settings, let along GraphQL.

This happened to me. And the graphql proponents that know gql love it but it’s so slow to build. I love Hugo and I wish there was a middle ground that was more approachable. I might have to try next.

We run a Hugo site on Vercel. Works fine

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#30

Post by flyinglizard » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 2:10 PM UTC

Pandabob wrote: post #22

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…

I've been wondering about this exact combo for a while. Your site looks nice. Any gotchas when using Shopify as just the backend? Did you use the Nextjs e-commerce starter template?

Thanks!

We developed from scratch, I frankly wasn’t aware of the template when we started but also wanted a very specific look and feel (and the whole planet section on the bottom of the welcome page obviously had lots of work).

Not aware of any issues. We did quite a tight integration with Shopify such as the entire website shop is 99% generated from the Shopify items (which in turn are generated from the Print On Demand catalogues. It’s turtles all the way down).