Things I learned from 5 years at Vercel

98•gk1•5h ago

Comments

anupj•4h ago

Love this: 'Passion without boundaries leads to burnout.' The hardest lesson in tech isn’t shipping fast or scaling—it’s learning when to actually go home. Sustainable output beats heroics every time

purple_ferret•4h ago

Sort of conflicts with the other points though, which basically sum up to "Be a 10X developer or die trying"

scrubs•2h ago

The whole thing is affirmational in the jacket of happy warrior. Self consistency was never the point.

layer8•1h ago

The conflict is resolved by realizing that points 2 and 3 aren’t valid.

srhtftw•2h ago

  Seek patience and passion in equal amounts.
  Patience alone will not build the temple.
  Passion alone will destroy its walls.

  - Maya Angelou

fizk•4h ago

One of the best, or maybe the best, coding presenter I've ever come across on youtube.

TimMeade•4h ago

Well written Lee; and 100% on point. So very true. Much thanks for moving the needle and good luck on what's next.

nilirl•3h ago

I've never worked at a startup that hit it big, so I came in wanting to disagree with whatever was in this post.

But I liked it. Now I'm mad.

huksley•2h ago

Leerob, thank you for your patience and help on Reddit community! The NextJS gets a lot of criticism these days but you helped a lot of people, with self-hosting NextJs and other tricky questions.

CharlieDigital•2h ago

Jumping onto a Next.js project right now that has no reason to have SSR. The code is now excessively complex, difficult to detangle, and I can't believe how bad the local DX is on a cold start on an M1 MBP. It's so slow; every nav is agonizing. Maybe it's how this is configured, maybe it's some other issue, but I definitely didn't encounter this with OOB stock Nuxt.js and of course, this project is an app that has no reason nor benefit for using Next.js.

No idea how Vercel scammed so many people. Founder paid an annual contract of $##,### to Vercel for what should be a freely hosted static web app + freely hosted (within credit boundaries) backend in a serverless container (e.g. Google Cloud Run, Azure Container Apps, etc.)

A complete scam.

miyuru•1h ago

I guess the branding and marketing worked.

Last time I checked Vercel was just reselling services of AWS.

CharlieDigital•1h ago

    > I guess the branding and marketing worked.

Indeed; I remember watching one of their tech sessions around the Next.js 12 to 13 release and then watching a Microsoft one. One was very clearly a marketing ad.

We shortly ditched Next.js afterwards because of how janky the whole DX was the entire time and how much worse it was during the transition.

Now I'm back in a Next.js 15 project and it's amazing that the DX somehow feels even worse!

c-hendricks•14m ago

Hey that's short selling them, they also managed to make HTTP middleware not work like you'd expect in nextjs which has some arcane advantage when hosted on Vercel.

huksley•1h ago

NextJS now is unecessary complex, and there are things to avoid to make sure everything works fine.

I am not sure why it is so slow for you, maybe you you can try run this boilerplate (work in progress to make it easy to use)

https://github.com/wizecore/boilerplate-saas/

It uses Pages router, comes with local postgres, redis and AWS sqs emulator. No docker, no cloud needed for it to work locally.

Such setup is crazy fast on my mbp m2 pro.

zappodobbo•2h ago

Vercel raised $563M so far. Where do you think you guys would have been if you had bootstrapped?

alberth•12m ago

Especially given that it's hosted on AWS.

(Reminds me of Heroku back in the day as being another "hosting" sold & layered on top of AWS)

cyanf•1h ago

leerob is so active in the space that I didn't realize until reading this that he isn't Vercel's founder.

gdbsjjdn•3m ago

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