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We Need To Talk About Vercel

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Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#91

Post by pcthrowaway »

lungeloslx wrote: post #89
random_rants wrote: post #77

What the hell. You have a page with a 150 jobs and a form. You basically don't need anything more than an html editor. We need to talk about how we do software architecture and technology choices today. In the time you played around with CDN stuff you easily could build a company listing, fixed your footer and header links, thinking about a pricing, build an apply-form, fixed/build job notifications, ...

While I may myself not have a complex setup for something that looks so simple on the surface, I think people here need to stop assuming they know everyone’s purpose for building software. Maybe the author intentionally set things up so they can have a low stakes system to learn about these technologies and improve their knowledge. This post is about Vercel and their poor practices. Let’s stay on topic and actually a…

> Let’s stay on topic and actually ask the author why such a complex setup instead of assuming you know and speaking off the cuff with criticism

I'd go a step further and say the question of why the author may or may not be overengineering their own app is besides the point.

I'm not saying asking out of curiosity would be a problem, but it shouldn't be construed as at all relevant to the very valid points OP is making regarding Vercel's service

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#92

Post by brillout »

Open alternative to Next.js: https://vite-plugin-ssr.com/ (I'm its author).

Open:

- Choose any UI framework you want (React/Vue/Solid/...)

- A lot more flexible than Next.js (e.g. i18n and base assets configuration are fundamentally more flexible)

- Keep architectural control (vite-plugin-ssr is more like a library and doesn't put itself in the middle of your stack)

- Use your favorite tools. And manually integrate them with vite-plugin-ssr (for full control without surprises).

- Deploy anywhere (and easily integrate with your existing server/deploy strategy)

- Open roadmap

- Ecosystem friendly

The upcoming "V1 Design" has been meticulously designed to be simple yet powerful. Once nested layouts, single route files, and typesafe links are implemented vite-plugin-ssr will be pretty much feature complete.

Note that, with vite-plugin-ssr, you implement your own renderer, which may or may not be something you want/need/like to do. Built-in renderers are coming and you’ll then get a zero-config DX like Next.js (minus extras like image processing as we believe they should be separate libraries).

Web dev isn't a zero sum game - a vibrant and healthy ecosystem of competing tools can co-exist. (I'm close to be able to make a living with sponsors.)

Vision is to make a truly open and collaborative foundation for meta frameworks.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#93

Post by satvikpendem »

no_wizard wrote: post #56
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…

Their moat may be from a technical perspective thin, however with that said, if you do deploy Next.js on Vercel with all the nice things that comes with out of the box, it’s hard to beat. And GCP, AWS nor Azure make it as out of the box seamless and keeps it that way as things scale. The big cloud providers “solutions” around this all fall short introducing mindless complexity to upsell you more services often with h…

I can use their NextJS Docker container anywhere though. Currently I do it on a Hetzner VPS for a few bucks a month and handle all the scale I need, no CDN or edge runtime required.

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#94

Post by iamsaitam »

brillout wrote: post #92

Open alternative to Next.js: https://vite-plugin-ssr.com/ (I'm its author). Open: - Choose any UI framework you want (React/Vue/Solid/...) - A lot more flexible than Next.js (e.g. i18n and base assets configuration are fundamentally more flexible) - Keep architectural control (vite-plugin-ssr is more like a library and doesn't put itself in the middle of your stack) - Use your favorite tools. And manually integrate t…

Even though you go on explaining what you mean by "open", seeing that the common definition is "open (source)", I'd go for a different qualifier.

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#95

Post by satvikpendem »

philsnow wrote: post #63
swyx wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-w…

Well, the React team implies that React Server Components were effectively a collaboration between the NextJS team and them, and that only NextJS currently supports RSC out of the major React frameworks.

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#96

Post by explaininjs »

oefrha wrote: post #13

Slightly related: Netlify has/had an even bigger problem around caching, and not just caching. I set `cache-control: public,max-age=2592000,immutable` on my SPAs' assets as they're hashed and should be immutable. But Netlify somehow doesn't atomically swap in a new version: say my index.html referenced /assets/index.12345678.js before and is updated to reference /assets/index.87654321.js instead, there's a split seco…

I wonder if somehow the request got handled by two different edge workers that were desynchronized? I’ve seen it happen in busy areas (NYC, etc.) where a single client will hit many Workers in a session whereas when connecting from a rural area I’ve never observed that.

Regardless, I say the solution is fat index files. Is there any tangible benefit to the long held tradition of separating the structure from the functionality from the styling? Seems to me like that’s just asking for trouble.

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#97

Post by satvikpendem »

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…

You don't have to use their hosting. I use their NextJS Docker container on Hetzner and it works just fine.

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#98

Post by iamsaitam »

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…

The last comment by @leerob which comes 2 years after the issue was opened, saying "we hear you" and "up-voting the issue is the best way for us to track that" just shows how empty their statements are, devoid of any intention do something about it. Very unprofessional behavior.

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#99

Post by maple3142 »

HeavyFeather wrote: post #26
klabb3 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A cdn is largely a value prop to reduce latency for static web pages, so that someone coming from a link get a page load asap. Once you have a dynamic or hybrid app, the value diminishes rather quickly, I assume. Potentially it could become negative if you have different points of failures and cache inconsistencies.

> 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.

> 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 my experience, CloudFlare (and other CDNs) can often provide a better route then a regular ISP. Sometimes downloading speed is really slow, switching to CloudFlare wrap (VPN) can at least double or triple the speed.

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#100

Post by 3np »

iamsaitam wrote: post #94
brillout wrote: post #92

Open alternative to Next.js: https://vite-plugin-ssr.com/ (I'm its author). Open: - Choose any UI framework you want (React/Vue/Solid/...) - A lot more flexible than Next.js (e.g. i18n and base assets configuration are fundamentally more flexible) - Keep architectural control (vite-plugin-ssr is more like a library and doesn't put itself in the middle of your stack) - Use your favorite tools. And manually integrate t…

Even though you go on explaining what you mean by "open", seeing that the common definition is "open (source)", I'd go for a different qualifier.

It's available under MIT License hosted on GitHub. Am I missing something?

https://github.com/brillout/vite-plugin-ssr/blob/main/LICENS...

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