July 2023 Summaries

Andersen Windows, a $3.4B annual revenue door and window enterprise, recently transformed their monolithic tech stack to a composable one using Sitecore, Next.js, and Vercel, resulting in improved user experience, peak site performance, and increased conversions. The company aimed to deliver an omnichannel experience, boost site performance, and improve developer efficiency by leveraging the headless capabilities of these technologies. With Horizontal Digital's help, they achieved significant ROI and leadership buy-in through a gradual, incremental approach to digital transformation, enabling them to showcase business value and accelerate time-to-market for new features. The adoption of Vercel has improved site resiliency, reduced development costs, and provided peace of mind for the dev team, while Next.js has enhanced their Google Core Web Vitals and driven higher rankings on search engines, ultimately bringing in new customers and revenue.

The Washington Post recently migrated to Next.js and Vercel, achieving fast rendering speeds and visually compelling results in the midst of constant updates from thousands of federal, state, and local elections. The team's unique challenges are addressed by building data pipelines, predictive models, and compelling visuals for readers, while staying attuned to reporters' needs and handling traffic spikes. With Vercel's collaboration tooling, they can review, test, and deploy rapidly, which was crucial for a flawless election night presentation of over 1,000 individual elections spread across 52 different results pages. The team experienced significant benefits from the migration, including easy scalability, responsive performance, and reduced tech debt, allowing them to focus on delivering high-quality content without interruptions.

react-tweet is a React component that allows developers to embed tweets into their applications without sacrificing performance, using static generation and server components. This eliminates the need for Twitter's embedded iframe, reducing client-side JavaScript load by 35x and improving UX with instantly visible tweets. The component is compatible with various React frameworks and provides built-in data fetching and caching, making it a convenient solution for developers to add tweets to their sites. With `react-tweet`, developers can easily get started by running `npm i react-tweet` and exploring the documentation for more information.

Vercel’s Frontend Cloud helped Examine increase free trials by 284% by improving page load times, developer workflow, and build times through incremental static regeneration, server-side rendering, and Next.js. Before adopting Vercel, Examine's team was struggling with a monolithic architecture setup that caused frustration and bottlenecks, but after switching, they experienced a significant decrease in build times from 15-20 minutes to just 1-2 minutes per build. With the help of Vercel’s Frontend Cloud, Examine’s developers were able to streamline their collaboration, reduce project size, and deliver better speed and performance to users nationwide.

The Turborepo team has successfully ported their high-performance build system from Go to Rust, using an incremental porting approach that allows them to maintain stability and make updates while migrating languages. The process involved writing new features in Rust, starting with a small feature called "global turbo" that allows users to install Turborepo as a globally available command on their machine. They then ported the CLI argument parser to Rust and implemented serialization to JSON for foreign function interfacing (FFI). However, they encountered challenges such as Windows-specific issues and Alpine Linux compatibility problems, which required them to adapt their approach and eventually compile their Go code and Rust code as separate binaries. Through this effort, the team has learned that serialization is useful for FFI, porting takes preparation, cross-compatibility is difficult, but ultimately, porting from Go to Rust was the correct choice for their strategic goals.

The new React 18 introduces several concurrent features that fundamentally change the way React applications can be rendered. These features improve application performance by allowing React to render multiple versions of the UI concurrently, prioritize tasks based on user interaction, and manage priorities between different tasks. The Transitions API enables smoother transitions during data fetches or screen changes without blocking user input. React Server Components allow developers to build components that work on both the server and client, combining the interactivity of client-side apps with the performance of traditional server rendering. Suspense improves loading performance by allowing parts of the application to render before others that may take longer to fetch data. Additionally, React 18 introduces a cache function that remembers the result of wrapped function calls, reducing the need for repeated network requests and improving application performance. These features enable developers to build more responsive, efficient, and scalable applications with improved user experiences.

Vercel's Frontend Cloud is a unified ecosystem that enables seamless integration of popular frameworks like Next.js and SvelteKit with various tools, allowing developers to focus on design while leveraging pre-built solutions. The platform provides framework-defined infrastructure, enabling fast deployment and iteration through its native integrations and Git integration. It also facilitates side-by-side collaboration, real-time commenting, issue tracking, and visual editing, blurring the lines between design and engineering. This approach empowers teams to work together efficiently, iterate rapidly, and create highly creative products.

The Vercel AI Accelerator has selected 40 startups and builders to participate in its program, which aims to support the development of innovative AI solutions. The participants include prominent builders and rising startups working on various impactful projects, such as cancer detection and academic research. Only 3% of over 1500 applications were accepted, demonstrating high standards for selection. Vercel's AI Accelerator is designed to help developers focus on creating value with their AI applications by providing a platform to build and deploy applications quickly and efficiently. The program offers exclusive perks and resources, including templates and guides, to support the growth of AI companies like Scale, Jasper, Perplexity, Runway, Lexica, and Jenni, which have launched with Next.js and Vercel over the past six months.

The Vercel Platforms Starter Kit is a fullstack template for building multi-tenant applications with custom domains using Next.js App Router, Vercel Postgres, and the Vercel Domains API. It allows users to build multi-tenant apps in record time with powerful features such as programmatically assigning unlimited custom domains, subdomains, and SSL certificates to their users. The kit comes with a variety of tools including an AI-powered Markdown editor, image uploads, custom styles, dynamic OG cards, dark mode, and more. It provides a simple way for developers to create full-stack applications with multi-tenancy and custom domain support using Next.js App Router and the Vercel Domains API. The starter kit is available on GitHub and is designed to help users build platforms that can scale to tens of thousands of custom domains and millions of pageviews on Vercel.