[Weekend Drop] Lee Robinson: Next.js, Vercel, and the SDK for the Web

Watch on video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlsTlFW7BSo

The following is my conversation with Lee Robinson, Head of Developer Relations at Vercel which recently launched Next.js 12, the most popular framework in the most popular programming language in the world.

The conversation can be broken into two parts. The first covering the new features in Next.js, primarily Next.js Middleware and Edge Handlers with zero Cold Starts thanks to Cloudflare Workers, the Next.js Live realtime collaboration feature, and how they are rewriting everything in Rust. The last third covers our respective views on Developer Relations, both doing the job and hiring for it.

Along the way we touch on Cloudflare vs Vercel, Remix vs Next.js, Static export vs Dynamic rendering, Webpack vs SWC, OpenTelemetry and Observability, WASM and awesome people we know in the industry.

Timestamps: 

[00:00:00] Cold Open 

[00:01:39] Next.js 12 

[00:03:52] Next.js Middleware

[00:06:08] Edge Functions

[00:07:23] React Server Components

[00:11:06] Netlify Edge Handlers

[00:12:48] Cloudflare & Vercel

[00:15:37] Self-hosting Next.js Middleware

[00:17:36] Static vs Dynamic Tradeoffs

[00:19:18] Remix vs Next.js

[00:22:32] next export

[00:25:13] Webpack 4 to 5

[00:26:06] Next.js Live

[00:30:50] Rust Rewrite

[00:34:36] OpenTelemetry and Observability

[00:37:14] Webpack vs swc and WASM

[00:40:41] Vercel Conference Strategy

[00:44:38] DevRel at Vercel

[00:52:50] Vercel and Svelte

[00:57:48] Dev Marketing and Content Mix