5 ms·

Vercel raised $300m+ at the top of the market and paid over the odds to hire a ton of JS ecosystem luminaries. Those investors are going want to see a return, n

by msy 3y ago

Vercel raised $300m+ at the top of the market and paid over the odds to hire a ton of JS ecosystem luminaries. Those investors are going want to see a return, not just an eyewatering wage bill. Anyone building on top of their ecosystem is going to get fleeced, they have no other route to possibly justifing their valuation or ever providing a passable return on that capital. Everyone else should be preparing their plan b for what happens if they impode and Next.js, Turborepo etc development fractures or grinds to a halt.

throwaway4good 3y ago
Contrary to what we think of ourselves, developers are easily bought off and subject to influencer campaigns.
- pavlov 3y ago
  Marketing to developers is so effective specifically because developers imagine themselves immune to marketing.
reducesuffering 3y ago
Letting Vercel handle developing half your infra for you. Expensive. Paying twice the $300k engineers to develop your VC scale app in 2023 using HTML templates or Create React App. Priceless
- mhoad 3y ago
  It’s really not an either / or scenario at all. There are tons of really good solutions to this problem that are incredibly affordable but they just aren’t popular in the React ecosystem which is once again off doing its own thing seemingly detached from everyone else and trying to just fit the React mental model into any abstraction they come across and patting themselves on the back about innovation in the process. Honestly React is an actively terrible place to have as your center of the universe when trying to build the kind of app you described. Not to say you can’t or shouldn’t use it but it most certainly shouldn’t be where the core is.
egeozcan 3y ago
> Everyone else should be preparing their plan b for what happens if they impode and Next.js, Turborepo etc development fractures or grinds to a halt. Isn't next.js too big to fail? Currently we are trying to define a modern stack for our front-end, and I always thought next.js/react to be the next java -> Perhaps Solid.js is much better (IMHO it surely is) but I probably won't get fired for choosing next. If not, what would be the alternative? I really don't want to restart with the hassle of configuring a js project from scratch. Done it already a thousand times, and that's a thousand times too many :)
- chrisco255 3y ago
  Next.js is open source, forkable, and self deployable.
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    Those are necessary but not sufficient conditions to having a healthy community which actually continues developing such forks, likely for free if the main company backing the original product goes away. I don't know why people think OSS is a panacea to community development, lots of things are OSS and have few to no contributors.
    - chrisco255 3y ago
      Honestly even the previous stable edition of Next.js before server components would be fine to peg to. But history has shown that when a framework or backend was sufficiently popular that people did indeed step in to support it. It happened with Node.js itself (which Next is built on) a while back with what was then called io.js, before io.js eventually re-merged with Node.js after the organizational kinks were worked out.
  - the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
    Next.js promotes serverless deployments and in that scenario it’s not sufficiently Open Source. Vercel (or amplify) adds proprietary stuff that’s missing in next itself. There is an Open Source serverless implementation for aws lambda (open next), but it’s not official.
pjmlp 3y ago
The problem are SaaS headless platforms that are now making Vercel/NextJS their main SDK tooling for frontend code, where everyone that decides to use another stack is faced with having to implement by themselves what those SDKs offer out of the box in Vercel/NextJS integration.

by msy 3y ago

throwaway4good 3y ago

Contrary to what we think of ourselves, developers are easily bought off and subject to influencer campaigns.

pavlov 3y ago
Marketing to developers is so effective specifically because developers imagine themselves immune to marketing.

reducesuffering 3y ago

Letting Vercel handle developing half your infra for you. Expensive. Paying twice the $300k engineers to develop your VC scale app in 2023 using HTML templates or Create React App. Priceless

mhoad 3y ago
It’s really not an either / or scenario at all. There are tons of really good solutions to this problem that are incredibly affordable but they just aren’t popular in the React ecosystem which is once again off doing its own thing seemingly detached from everyone else and trying to just fit the React mental model into any abstraction they come across and patting themselves on the back about innovation in the process. Honestly React is an actively terrible place to have as your center of the universe when trying to build the kind of app you described. Not to say you can’t or shouldn’t use it but it most certainly shouldn’t be where the core is.

egeozcan 3y ago

> Everyone else should be preparing their plan b for what happens if they impode and Next.js, Turborepo etc development fractures or grinds to a halt. Isn't next.js too big to fail? Currently we are trying to define a modern stack for our front-end, and I always thought next.js/react to be the next java -> Perhaps Solid.js is much better (IMHO it surely is) but I probably won't get fired for choosing next. If not, what would be the alternative? I really don't want to restart with the hassle of configuring a js project from scratch. Done it already a thousand times, and that's a thousand times too many :)

chrisco255 3y ago
Next.js is open source, forkable, and self deployable.
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  Those are necessary but not sufficient conditions to having a healthy community which actually continues developing such forks, likely for free if the main company backing the original product goes away. I don't know why people think OSS is a panacea to community development, lots of things are OSS and have few to no contributors.
  - chrisco255 3y ago
    Honestly even the previous stable edition of Next.js before server components would be fine to peg to. But history has shown that when a framework or backend was sufficiently popular that people did indeed step in to support it. It happened with Node.js itself (which Next is built on) a while back with what was then called io.js, before io.js eventually re-merged with Node.js after the organizational kinks were worked out.
- the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
  Next.js promotes serverless deployments and in that scenario it’s not sufficiently Open Source. Vercel (or amplify) adds proprietary stuff that’s missing in next itself. There is an Open Source serverless implementation for aws lambda (open next), but it’s not official.

pjmlp 3y ago

The problem are SaaS headless platforms that are now making Vercel/NextJS their main SDK tooling for frontend code, where everyone that decides to use another stack is faced with having to implement by themselves what those SDKs offer out of the box in Vercel/NextJS integration.