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.
USD 21M in funding comes from some of the best VCs (Accel, CRV) and impressive individual investors (Jordan Walke, Nat Friedman, Pete Hunt, Jessie Frazelle, Soleio, Naval Ravikant, and several others to list).
Vercel’s founder, Guillermo Rauch, announced the change. It’s official.
Why change the name to Vercel?#
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! ✌️
Ahmad Awais
