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We Need To Talk About Vercel

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Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#61

Post by Aeolun »

lolinder wrote: post #58
stevebmark wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I think you must have missed that the first post is a replacement of the actual feature request that someone submitted. I have no dog in this fight, but it's pretty slimy to respond to someone's request by overwriting it with your explanation. They effectively hijacked the requester's name, profile picture, and who knows how many upvotes to push their own message instead of letting them have their say and, you know,…

I was wondering why this message was so weird. Like the last post in a discussion came first…

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#62

Post by Aeolun »

Kevcmk wrote: post #60
stevebmark wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Which one, the go ahead and "define your own custom loader"? You mean re-implement the image export that is sitting right there in their express server... from scratch? Hah. NextJS won't let you export their optimized images in a static site export because they want _everything_ running through their Express server. Why's that great for them? Because they get to charge you for image bandwidth and image optimization.…

To be fair, you can optimize images yourself, or just not optimize them at all.

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#63

Post by philsnow »

swyx wrote: post #59
preommr wrote: post #14

Vercel scares the hell out of me - their previous handling of that runaway bill of 6k was atrociuos. They basically blamed the user and only handled it after it gained traction on social media. Beyond that, they do a lot of things with web, while having very little moat as a company. By that I mean they're involved in a lot of front-end libraries, articles, projects, etc. a lot of which they incorporate into their pl…

> while having very little moat as a company they have effectively acquihired React (Zuck's mistake). no moat? (not to mention some genuinely great cloud DX and other platform features eg with their Edge Streaming)

> they have effectively acquihired React (Zuck's mistake). no moat?

I honestly don't even know what are you saying, is it that Vercel hiring the React folks makes Vercel untouchable somehow?

I see a complete disconnect between the two things. If anything, the "acquihire" could well lead to those React folks doing a job search because Vercel doesn't have a high switching-away-from cost and keeps dropping the ball PR-wise.

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#64

Post by hitekker »

stevebmark wrote: post #48
Kevcmk wrote: post #38

Vercel is deceitful. The Image/img fiasco really pulled the covers off for vercel for me. I have migrated all my work off of the platform. NextJS’ lint strategically dissuades you from using the img tag in favor of the NextJS Image component. If you make the mistake of heeding this advice and migrating to it, you can’t use static site generation—which means you are stuck using their hosting. Here’s one of the most PR…

[flagged]

> It reminds me of the npm hate

The comparison to npm is worrisome. npm inc. spent years trying to make a profit & grow beyond "privately owned package registry". It failed and was acqui-hired by Github back in 2020 for an amount far beneath its capitalization.

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#65

Post by philsnow »

oefrha wrote: post #57
comex wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the JS file somehow being embedded into index.html on the server side? If not, how do you expect this to be atomic when the user’s browser is making two separate requests (with an arbitrary delay between them)?

The atomicity is for the site update. If I'm deploying to my server, the structure would look like: /srv/example.com/prod -> /srv/example.com/versions/1 /srv/example.com/versions/1/index.html /srv/example.com/versions/1/assets/index.12345678.js /srv/example.com/versions/2/index.html /srv/example.com/versions/2/assets/index.87654321.js A new version is atomically swapped in by changing the prod link from versions/1 to…

> Or I could simply include the last build's assets as there's no conflict potential.

It looks like your build puts the hashes into the file names for each asset (instead of just naming resources purely as the output from the hashing function). If you're using a halfway decent hash function, you're ~never going to get a hash conflict even across all of your assets, let alone across all the versions of an asset for a single source file name.

You could just leave all the old assets in place (esp because many of them won't change from build to build) and prune hashed assets that you know haven't been referenced from an index.html in >1 month.

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#66

Post by illiarian »

leerob wrote: post #30
flimsypremise wrote: post #28

My sense of Vercel (mostly from working with NextJS) is that they are more interested in appearing to support an open source framework while making their product as difficult to interoperate with other technologies as possible in an attempt to lock users into their platform and hopefully pay for it.

Hey, I'm on the team at Vercel. What could we do better? Open to your feedback. Our platform integrates with 30+ frameworks ( https://vercel.com/docs/frameworks ), we directly fund the development of Next.js and Svelte, and we sponsor Nuxt, Astro, Solid, and more.

> Hey, I'm on the team at Vercel. What could we do better? Open to your feedback.

You recently broke Next.js with AsyncLocalStorage by putting it in globalThis and breaking any runtime that's not Vercel's. With no specification, and other runtimes scrambled to reverse engineer your implementation: https://twitter.com/ascorbic/status/1616811724224471043 and https://twitter.com/lcasdev/status/1616826809328304129

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#68

Post by steve_adams_86 »

Kevcmk wrote: post #38

Vercel is deceitful. The Image/img fiasco really pulled the covers off for vercel for me. I have migrated all my work off of the platform. NextJS’ lint strategically dissuades you from using the img tag in favor of the NextJS Image component. If you make the mistake of heeding this advice and migrating to it, you can’t use static site generation—which means you are stuck using their hosting. Here’s one of the most PR…

Can’t you adjust your config to serve the images using your own cdn with the Image component? By default maybe it’s vercel-friendly, but I recall it being trivial to adjust to use any other path instead.

Has this changed?

You could also modify the linting rules to exclude the Image rule.

Not saying vercel is awesome. I no longer use their products. I just didn’t find this particular matter to be problematic.

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#69

Post by victorbjorklund »

comex wrote: post #54
HeavyFeather wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Potentially Unless CloudFlare cables are somehow shinier than the rest of the internet’s, adding one hop almost certainly adds latency. More hops more time. In some instances where the original server was closer than CF’s edge, I measured increased time even for cached content, effectively making CF slower for every request by that specific user.

If the site is both static and busy enough, then the majority of users never need to do a roundtrip to the original server. If the site isn’t busy enough… well, I think more CDNs ought to support pre-caching. Supposedly Vercel does?

You can warm up the cache with cloudflare R2 or Bunnycdn edge storage.

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#70

Post by kekkidy »

theobr wrote: post #55
llambda wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I reached out to you asking for a comment which I could add to the article, not for your technical support. I was surprised and I have to admit a bit dismayed to watch you throw yourself into the fray on a Sunday. The technical issues, which in fact persist, are at this point an aside to the way Vercel has handled this issue.

It’s pretty clear these issues were beyond what traditional support was capable of. If you had reached out to someone like Lee earlier it’s likely your experience would have been much better Vercel’s definitely in a weird place, trying to be the home for innovation while also offering more traditional support. While the support experience you had was less than ideal, you’re also failing to recognize that you are blee…

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