好像失去喜欢人的能力
date
Mar 11, 2021
slug
next-for-vercel
status
Published
tags
Website
summary
What's Next
type
Post
Reflecting on the growth of our business, which in 2020 alone added the likes of Airbnb, The Washington Post, Trip Advisor, Scale and Hashicorp as flagship customers, I'm sharing 7 tailwinds behind our acceleration.
Why are teams of all sizes choosing to develop, preview and ship their websites with Next.js and Vercel? Where are we going next?
Jeff Bezos' famous Day 1 letter to shareholders goes:
There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality.
Applying this to web development, focusing on the frontend is the most customer-obsessive way to build your products.
Every interaction with your customer goes through your frontend, from their first contact with your brand, every purchase, every signup, every article, every form submission.
And each time, your frontend has an opportunity to impress, delight, perform, be accessible and memorable.
What's more, frontend is an area of technological and artistic differentiation, while backend becomes increasingly commoditized, turnkey and undifferentiated.
For Vercel, being customer focused represents a unique challenge: to delight our developer customer, and to give them the tools and platform to delight their customer.
Next.js pioneered the concept of zero configuration in the React space, letting you focus exclusively on your product.
However, it wasn't just about developer experience. We shipped a lot of the essential preconfiguration to meet the needs of users.
That included out-of-the-box server rendering for fast page boots and optimal SEO, code splitting, production bundle optimization and minification.
This has enabled the frontend developer, motivated by a better experience, to succeed in production.
A key ingredient of being customer focused is not being dogmatic, meeting the customer where they are and enabling incremental adoption of the promising new technology.
At the time of its release four years ago, and unlike contemporaries, Next.js took some contrarian bets.
Multi page over single page (SPA). Server rendering (SSR) over spinners. Dynamism everywhere instead of just the client side.
Over time, new optimization opportunities emerged, like static site generation (SSG), which concretely means pre-rendering pages and automatically caching them at the edge.
Pure server rendering wouldn't have been enough. Pure static (Jamstack) is not enough. Giving the developer the power and optionality of SSR and SSG on a per-page basis? That works.
JavaScript is the lingua franca of the frontend world, but it also has the unique property that it can run everywhere.
Everywhere as in the build process (SSG), the origin (SSR), the edge, and the final frontier: the client's device.
Vercel embraces this serverless everywhere computing model. When you push to Git, we automatically start building your project. At that time, frameworks like Next.js run your code to pre-render pages before they're ever accessed by the user.
But the computation doesn't stop there. The build process is capable of outputting serverless functions in addition to static assets. These will execute code on demand as users access them, enabling greater personalization and dynamism.