August 2022 Summaries

Megh Vakharia, CEO of Integral Studio and CTO at SymphonyOS, has been working with Vercel since 2017 to create innovative digital experiences for artists like Grammy-winning SZA and multi-platinum performers. The company's platform, SymphonyOS, aims to democratize music marketing for independent artists by providing them with the tools to build sustainable businesses off their music. With Vercel's serverless scalability and uptime guarantees, Integral has been able to simplify its infrastructure needs and deploy websites quickly, allowing artists like SZA to focus on creating and innovating alongside their teams. The company is committed to backwards compatibility, making it easy for artists to upgrade their sites as new technologies emerge. Despite the rise of TikTok and Instagram, Integral recognizes the power of the web in bringing people together and creating unique experiences for fans. By partnering with Vercel, Integral can scale and build tools for independent artists, letting them create at the moment of inspiration and enjoy the stardom that follows.

Support for WebAssembly in Vercel Edge Functions enables developers to compile and run their applications with languages like Rust, Go, C, and more. This simplifies the process of building at the edge without requiring complicated setup or changes to workflow. WebAssembly allows developers to take existing libraries written in different languages and use them directly in Edge Functions, making it possible to reuse code across languages. By recompiling dependencies to Wasm, developers can potentially move serverless functions from JavaScript to Edge Functions, especially for computationally heavy tasks like encoding and decoding binary data. The compilation of WebAssembly is often faster than the same code in JavaScript, with a potential speedup of 2-3 times for computationally heavy workloads. This enables developers to write idiomatic code in their chosen language and run it on the Edge, resulting in improved performance and efficiency.

The Vercel Engineering Team aimed to improve the performance of the Vercel Dashboard, aiming for a Lighthouse score of 94 and achieving an average Vercel Analytics score of 95 on desktop. To achieve this, they identified "hot paths" in their application, which are code snippets that have the most significant impact on page load times. The team used various techniques to optimize these hot paths, including minimizing JavaScript usage, leveraging caching, optimizing imported code, and strategically lazy loading heavy components. They also discussed strategies for third-party scripts, HTML and CSS optimization, and using data to improve user experience. By implementing these techniques, the Vercel Dashboard saw significant improvements in performance, resulting in better user experiences and lifts in SEO.

The `Interaction to Next Paint` (INP) metric measures how responsive a webpage is to user interactions, with lower values indicating better responsiveness. INP is an experimental metric that aims to replace First Input Delay (FID), and its stability has been announced, which may impact search rankings. React can improve INP by using techniques like selective hydration with Suspense, which enables non-blocking hydration and prioritizes interactive components, leading to faster page interactions and lower FID values. This approach also improves other metrics such as Total Blocking Time (TBT) and Time to Interactive (TTI), potentially enhancing Lighthouse scores. The use of INP has been demonstrated in a case study with Next.js, where the site's INP was reduced from 430ms to 80ms using selective hydration with Suspense, resulting in improved Vitals metrics.

Hashnode, a blogging platform for developers built using Next.js, leverages Vercel to manage custom domains, content at scale, and performance. The company's engineering team saves time by utilizing Vercel's previewing deployments and testing changes in a production-like environment without configuring staging. Migrating to Vercel also improved Hashnode's speed monitoring and optimization, ensuring fast load times and optimized images, which is essential for its developer audience. With Vercel, Hashnode can focus on delivering value to users rather than managing infrastructure.