"On average 41% of developers' time is spent on technical debt." Said another way, on average 2 days per work week are spent managing technical debt.
Therefore, if anyone, any business, or any organization seeks to take up the mantle of empowering and enabling developers, it will be in the area of building and investing in tools to give time back to developers.
Vercel does this. Let's talk about how.
Developer Pain
In working with teams of developers, we know that developer pain comes down to a singular issue: the amount of friction in the development process, i.e time spent managing technical debt.
This Stripe _The Developer Coefficient Report shows the discouraging amount of time we developers spend on handling technical debt. A few highlights:
"17.3 average hours spent by developers on bad code, debugging, refactoring, modifying"
"$85 billion global GDP loss from developer time spent on bad code annually."
“13.5hrs spent per week on technical debt”
Simply put, technical debt means more friction which means more time spent on things we don't want to spend our time on.
Developer Dreams
Developers love a good developer experience (DX). Yet, we continue to dream of the potential for a better DX. We love tools like TypeScript, easy API's (Prisma anyone?), innovative query languages (tRPC and GROQ), AI pairing with GitHub Copilot, and generally anything that makes our lives easier.
Typescript is estimated to prevent 38% of bugs in a codebase.
With Prisma, one company rebuilt their backend in 6 months and made their application 4 times faster. The previous setup took them 3 years to build.
Founder of Ping, Theo demonstrated how tRPC helped him cut his backend code in half.
All these tools have one main thing in common: They help to remove friction from the development process, giving back to developers the precious time lost in rolling their own solutions.
Developers are always on the lookout for friction-removing tools that markedly improve DX cutting time spent on technical debt.
Enter Vercel.
Vercel: Helping developers and teams remove technical debt
How is Vercel empowering frontend developers?
We’ve talked about developer pain because it’s the reminder of that pain that invokes gratitude for what Vercel is doing for frontend developers.
At MongoDB World, Guillermo Rauch gave a talk on integrating Vercel with MongoDB. In the talk, he explained the core values of Vercel's Serverless Frontend Infrastructure:
- Easy
- Scalable
- Fast
I would sum up those three values with this phrase: absence of friction.
Easy
Again, to quote Guillermo:
Making things easy and creating a great developer experience has been the calling of my career
And Vercel has made frontend development easy. Just look at any of the 50+ Integrations that you can add to any project with a few clicks. As frontend developers, figuring out how to connect databases, choosing a CMS, setting up Logs, adding Devtools, and so on is time consuming. With a few clicks this overhead is removed.
Or look at any of the 100+ templates which you can spin up with a single click. For freelance projects, side projects, or choosing the right stack for a client, a Vercel template moves you from decision making to action in very little time. As frontend developers, we get to spend less time focusing on architectural choices and spend more time on adding features.
Vercel also makes the deployment story delightful. Through integration with Nextjs, deployments are fast and seamless.
Potter (Nathan Potter, CTO of Wander) appreciates that Vercel allows his developers to iterate quickly and deploy new features 200% faster.
Vercel is also bringing better deployments to other frontend frameworks.
Scalable
Spinning up templates and delivering features is amazing. So how does Vercel help frontend developers scale and distribute these easily built applications to our users globally?
Edge Functions! With edge functions, frontend developers can deliver applications to the most remote user through declaring regions where those applications are to be available.
Edge Functions allow Read.cv to deliver personalized content from a location close to their users, decreasing latency. - Vercel Customer, Read.cv
Fast
Frontend developers want their tooling to be fast. Esbuild has had incredible impacts on the javascript ecosystem. Previously, Javascript tooling has been written in Javascript. Esbuild was written in Go and the benchmarks between esbuild and other tooling written in Javascript are astounding.
Rust, like Go, is another low-level language that makes javascript tool incredibly fast. The Vercel team has been investing in their Rust compiler for Nextjs and hired/is hiring developers dedicated to making tooling better with Rust, like the creator of SWC.
Adopting SWC has meant:
‘~3x faster Fast Refresh and ~5x faster builds for Nextjs’ - Lee Robinson
While talking about builds, since joining Vercel, Turborepo has saved developers countless hours on builds and made workflows a delight with remote caching. Here are a few highlights from Vercel customers using Turborepo:
We’re loving Turborepo. It’s taken 30% off our build times.” — Francesco Di Lorenzo, Co-founder of Typefully
The Endear team has saved 533 hrs in one month with Turborepo. CTO JP Grace said:
"we have increased our deployment rate 7x, reduced our lead time by 95%, kept our change failure rate below 1%, and held our MTTR (mean time to recovery, repair, respond, or resolve) below a minute. Much of this wouldn’t have been possible without the accelerated feedback we get from Turborepo.”
Edge functions also have a say in fast. Fast is not only important for development, it is also important for the speed at which end users get access to the content. Edge functions cache content 'at the edge' making content and data readily available to users upon request.
With Vercel’s Edge Network, the Pococha team can now intelligently route traffic and run logic as close to their users’ location as possible, increasing speed, improving site performance, and making the user experience that much better - Vercel Customer Pococha
With easy deployments and a marketplace for integrations and templates (easy), edge functions (scale), and a Rust compiler for Nextjs and Edge caching as well as TurboRepo (fast), Vercel is improving the lives of developers.
Get started with great developer experience at Vercel
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