https://twitter.com/steventey/status/1410991784339984385?s=20

I am very excited to announce that I will be joining the incredible team at ▲[Vercel](https://vercel.com) to help build the future of web development!

I've been an avid user of [NextJS](https://nextjs.org) for a while now and the opportunity to help other developers build cool things with this framework is like a dream come true!

## How It All Started

For me, accepting this offer was a no-brainer decision, but the path that led me to it was actually quite serendipitous.

https://twitter.com/steventey/status/1410991786013589509

Back in May, while working on [Elegance](https://elegance.ai), I accepted [Guillermo Rauch](https://twitter.com/rauchg)'s (CEO of Vercel) invitation to work on a really exciting freelance project with Vercel – the details of which are to be announced very soon.

Three weeks into the project, I received a term sheet for Elegance's pre-seed round.

I was overjoyed!

It's always been my dream to build my own startup, so I thought, "ok, I'll wrap up my project with Vercel and dive into Elegance full time!!"

https://twitter.com/steventey/status/1410991786965696514?s=20

## Guillermo's Offer

However, last week, things took an unexpected turn.

I had a call with Guillermo, who suggested that I joined Vercel full-time instead and learn the following skills that would be invaluable when it comes to building a startup:

- Hard skills like infra engineering, DevRel, E2E testing, enterprise SaaS, etc.
- Soft skills like hiring & managing the best talent, negotiation techniques, etc.
- I’ll also get the the opportunity to work directly with Vercel’s clients, a lot of which are Fortune 500 cos, and that will let me understand what their needs are and help me build a much better B2B product in the future.

The amount of growth potential is immense, not to mention it’ll be much easier it’ll be for me to raise at a better valuation later because of the skills, connections, and reputation that I would’ve built through this opportunity. This is really alluring for me at this stage of my career.

## Saying "Yes"
Essentially, he made me an offer I couldn't refuse.

Two days later, I signed the offer and it became official – I'm now part of the Vercel family!

I would like to thank Guillermo for this amazing opportunity and Lee for being a wonderful mentor and guiding me through the trenches.

Special shoutout to Kevin for being super accommodating throughout the hiring process!

https://twitter.com/steventey/status/1410991789834522625?s=20

Last but not least, to those of you who are building with #NextJS, or if you're looking to learn how to build cool stuff with #NextJS – my Twitter DMs are always open!

https://twitter.com/steventey/status/1410991790966992899?s=20

Whether it's a question about SWR, or a feature request for the Vercel team, I'd love to hear from you!

I'll be joining the incredible team at Vercel to help build the future of web development.

Vercel: The Newest Chapter of My Life

Steven's New Site

It comes in clutch every time I wanna build a site. Great stuff!!

Clutch

Veracity [noun]: The degree of truth of a certain subject.

Example: we use veracity to determine the quality of the type of craziness blab lbalblabl abl ablb albalbalba lbalba. 

The true definition of success lies in the heart of a soldier who died on the battlefield but came back to life.

Veracity

Vercel, the company behind the popular open-source Next.js React framework, today announced that it has raised a $102 million Series C funding round led by Bedrock Capital. Existing investors Accel, CRV, Geodesic Capital, Greenoaks Capital and GV also participated in this round, together with new investors 8VC, Flex Capital, GGV, Latacora, Salesforce Ventures and Tiger Global. In total, the company has now raised $163 million and its current valuation is $1.1 billion. what awuladiw whath a

As Vercel notes, the company saw strong growth in recent months, with traffic to all sites and apps on its network doubling since October 2020. The number of sites among the world’s largest 10,000 websites that use Next.js grew 50% in the same time frame, too.

Given the open-source nature of the Next.js framework, not all of these users are obviously Vercel customers, but its current paying customers include the likes of Carhartt, Github, IBM, McDonald’s and Uber.

“For us, it all starts with a front-end developer,” Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch told me. “Our goal is to create and empower those developers — and their teams — to create delightful, immersive web experiences for their customers.”

With Vercel, Rauch and his team took the Next.js framework and then built a serverless platform that specifically caters to this framework and allows developers to focus on building their front ends without having to worry about scaling and performance.

Older solutions, Rauch argues, were built in isolation from the cloud platforms and serverless technologies, leaving it up to the developers to deploy and scale their solutions. And while some potential users may also be content with using a headless content management system, Rauch argues that increasingly, developers need to be able to build solutions that can go deeper than the off-the-shelf solutions that many businesses use today.

Rauch also noted that developers really like Vercel’s ability to generate a preview URL for a site’s front end every time a developer edits the code. “So instead of just spending all your time in code review, we’re shifting the equation to spending your time reviewing or experiencing your front end. That makes the experience a lot more collaborative,” he said. “So now, designers, marketers, IT, CEOs […] can now come together in this collaboration of building a front end and say, ‘that shade of blue is not the right shade of blue.'”

“Vercel is leading a market transition through which we are seeing the majority of value-add in web and cloud application development being delivered at the front end, closest to the user, where true experiences are made and enjoyed,” said Geoff Lewis, founder and managing partner at Bedrock. “We are extremely enthusiastic to work closely with Guillermo and the peerless team he has assembled to drive this revolution forward and are very pleased to have been able to co-lead this round.”

Vercel raises $102M Series C for its front-end development platform

Vercel's Incredible Series C

Until now, trying to style an article, document, or blog post with Tailwind has been a tedious task that required a keen eye for typography and a lot of complex custom CSS.


By default, Tailwind removes all of the default browser styling from paragraphs, headings, lists and more. This ends up being really useful for building application UIs because you spend less time undoing user-agent styles, but when you really are just trying to style some content that came from a rich-text editor in a CMS or a markdown file, it can be surprising and unintuitive.


We get lots of complaints about it actually, with people regularly asking us things like:


Why is Tailwind removing the default styles on my h1 elements? How do I disable this? What do you mean I lose all the other base styles too?


We hear you, but we're not convinced that simply disabling our base styles is what you really want. You don't want to have to remove annoying margins every time you use a p element in a piece of your dashboard UI. And I doubt you really want your blog posts to use the user-agent styles either — you want them to look awesome, not awful.


The @tailwindcss/typography plugin is our attempt to give you what you actually want, without any of the downsides of doing something stupid like disabling our base styles.


It adds a new prose class that you can slap on any block of vanilla HTML content and turn it into a beautiful, well-formatted document:

Until now, trying to style an article, document, or blog post with Tailwind has been a tedious task that required a keen eye for typography and a lot of complex custom CSS.

Tailwind Typography

If your page contains frequently updating data, and you don’t need to pre-render the data, SWR is a perfect fit and no special setup needed: just import useSWR and use the hook inside any components that use the data.

Here’s how it works:

First, immediately show the page without data. You can show loading states for missing data.
Then, fetch the data on the client side and display it when ready.
This approach works well for user dashboard pages, for example. Because a dashboard is a private, user-specific page, SEO is not relevant and the page doesn’t need to be pre-rendered. The data is frequently updated, which requires request-time data fetching.

