For two years until December 2020 I worked at Vercel (formerly ZEIT), creators of Next.js, helping scale the platform and ship the dashboard people actually use.
How It Started
It was a dark and stormy night. I'd been using Next.js for close to a year on nearly every project, deploying to then-ZEIT, and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience end to end..
Back then I was relying heavily on my phone and mobile web experience on the dashboard wasn't as good as it is today. Coincidentally, I was looking for a project to sharpen my React Native skills, since I haven't touched it in a while at that point. And what do you know, ZEIT had their API fully open and documented. And so, Now Mobile was born, an app that replaced the web dashboard.
I went all in on features:
- Event history
- Deployments view
- Active aliases
- Domains with Now CDN status
- Usage statistics to date
- Teams support
- Spotlight search
- Touch ID / Face ID
- Today widgets (Instances, Usage)
- Apple Watch app
Shortly after the Product Hunt launch, Guillermo Rauch got in touch. A few weeks later I was on the team.
What I Worked On
Lots of things. The product dashboard. The Import Project flow you land on when you bring in a Git repo. The now-retired Now Desktop app. The Node.js client that powers Git integrations and the CLI. The CLI itself. Internal tooling, and a long tail of everyday features.
Also backend and API work: team invitations, Google Cloud user integration, Git repo integrations, deployment logs, and more.
backendlessConf_
Before online conferences became the default, Vercel hosted a fully-online conference called backendlessConf_.
Unrelated to my official job: I have a fair bit of video and streaming experience, so I helped with the streaming setup and ops during the conference.
Next.js
My contributions to Next.js were mostly around framework design, driven by the Vercel dashboard — which I still believe is the largest production Next.js app in the world. It is a genuinely massive web app.
I wrote an early experimental implementation of SWR. We shelved it for a while as too experimental, until @shuding_ picked the idea up and made it incredible.
All In All
Vercel taught me more than I expected and is still the job I measure others against. I'm looking forward to whatever they ship next.
