I’ve been building sites with the Next.js framework for a couple of years now. It started with a simple workflow of Code ❯ now CLI ❯ Live site with CDN/SSL using the ZEIT platform.
ZEIT just announced that they have raised a $21M funding and have rebranded the platform as Vercel. This is amazing news. I believe in the mission of making it easier to build, deploy, and ship web apps.
I have no insights into the official decision making here, I personally loved the name ZEIT but it did take me some time to figure out how to pronounce it right. It’s a german word right.
I imagine people found pronouncing ZEIT harder than they would Vercel. If you check the change-timeline they are changing everything to Vercel. Instead of ZEIT + Now, there will now only be Vercel and Vercel’s CLI.
This could also be a pivot on front-end tech in contrary to backendless backend what used to be ZEIT’s messaging. I think it makes sense.
About a week ago I announced my NodeCLI.com course. It’s the same site I had built for VSCode.pro — but I have switched over from Gatsby to Next.js. I couldn’t be happier. Lots of reasons why:
🚀 Vercel is super duper fast. I used to have 3-5 mins long build pipeline with Gatsby.js and Netlify. Now my site gets built-in 50 secs. That’s a big deal for me.
🤖 Google loves fast sites that are not all JavaScript. That’s true. Google wants you to build sites that are performant by default. Next.js has performance built-in. Both SSR and SSG builds help you feed your HTML to Google the way it prefers. That helps your Google rankings, something I believe has a direct impact on my business.
🗃 Next.js has the right idea. Whenever I build a JAMstack site, I end up with the need to scale beyond just static. I want a hybrid approach. This is something you understand once your static site is in production. With Next.js, I can make a page: CSR — Client-Side Rendering SSR — Server-Side Rendering SSG — Static Site Generation
…and with every PR getting a deploy URL preview, code collaboration becomes super fun. This is the feature that comes in handy for SaaS companies that I’m consulting with. Save everyone a lot of time.
There’s also an RFC on incremental builds that in near future will even further improve the build times for large sites. The biggest static site I have built had about 21,000 pages. I’m currently migrating it to Vercel.
If you have a Next.js project, you’d like my help on, get in touch.
Stay safe and healthy. Peace! ✌️
🌳 Node.js foundation Community Committee Outreach Lead, Member Linux Foundation, OpenAPI Business Governing Board, and DigitalOcean Navigator. 📟 Teaching thousands of developers Node.js CLI Automation and VSCode.pro course. Over 142 million views, 24 yrs Blogging, 108K developers learning, 200+ FOSS.
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Ahmad Awais
