Published on July 2, 2020

🙏 Thank you, Vercel

After Kadira, I joined Vercel (AKA: ZEIT) in early 2017. Then I maintained Next.js for about a year until Tim took it over. I didn't add many features to Next.js, but I think I made some improvements in testing and reliability.

I still think my most significant contribution to Next.js is the "Learn Next.js" project.

My Time at Vercel

Then I got the responsibility of a critical part of Vercel deployment flow. I really love working on that. Literally, we were building a startup, and I played a crucial role in that. That's excited me to keep working.

I never wanted to work on backend/infra forever. Due to that reason, I no longer enjoy working on that responsibility. That's why I'm leaving.

I'm not leaving Vercel due to any problem I faced at the company. And I'm not looking for work right now. Thank you!

I want to thank rauchg for hiring me and everyone who worked at Vercel with me. It's fantastic to work in a remote company with people from all over the world. I will miss that for sure.

What's next?

Even though I am taking a break, I'm not going on a long holiday. Instead, I try to experiment with what I always love to do -- Teach and work on open source projects.

Teaching

I think I collected a lot of knowledge these years, and there are many ways I could share that experience. I believe in open education -- but at the same time, content creators should get paid properly.

I will try some ideas related to this in the coming months. If you are interested, join my newsletter or follow me on Twitter.

Open Source

In every app, there's a common set of functionalities we have to do. But most of the time, we re-create them from scratch. I get it, we need a different look and feel and slightly different functionality. Still, there's room for reusability. We waste a lot of resources.

What if we have something like this:

When you are starting up, you get some standard set of components and build your app quickly.
You might want to customize how those components work, and there are some options you could choose.
For example, you can use Auth0, firebase, Magic Link, or even next-auth to add login functionality. But how you code the login functionality in the same.
Then you want to use an existing Login component from NPM. You use uber/baseweb. But creators of that component never heard about baseweb. But still, the login component works really well.
After a few months, you need to add some additional login functionality. So, you build your own component.
You might even consider sharing it with everybody.

This is just for the auth layer, what if we can apply the same for many other things.

That's what I am excited about.

See you soon with some exciting news.