Front-end web development is the practice of converting data to a graphical interface, so that users can view and interact with that data. Front-end developers combine elements of both design and programming to create websites or mobile apps.
And while HTML was once the primary programming language for front-end developers, today it is almost all built with Javascript. And one of the tools used to work in Javascript, Next.js, is helping to revolutionise front-end development.
Its author is a self-taught software engineer and front-end web developer, Guillermo Rauch, who turned his freely available tool on Github into a fast-growing SaaS business called Vercel.
“The DNA of the company and my career as a developer has been in the front-end space. The first thing that really started a passion in programming for me was the ability to run code on the client side, inside the browser. Vercel evolved as a platform to democratise access to the tooling in the global edge network to make these front-end based applications really fast, really practical,” says Rauch.
Founded in 2015, the Walnut, California-based Vercel helps enterprises who would otherwise have to hire and recruit front-end infrastructure teams by giving them the tools to build on the web, the primary component of which is the Next.js open-source framework that has become one of the most popular in the category. The Next.js framework utilizes JAMstack architecture, which distinguishes between front-end and back-end and allows for efficient front-end development that is independent of any back-end APIs. The company positions itself as enabling frontend teams to do their best work.
Next.js is built on the revolutionary engine called React that Facebook and Google pioneered in the creation of their real-time news feeds, allowing for real-time commenting, liking and sharing, which required a lot of a code on the client side to make this possible.
“The React component now has near 100% adoption and any modern company is standardising on what I sometimes have called the ‘Lego break for adults’. Because it's very compossible, easy to use and it saves us a lot of time. Next.js took that engine and gave companies a way to build entire systems, applications, and websites, allowing them to reuse open source component libraries to become very prolific creators and publishers of the web,” says Rauch.
Once Rauch made Next.js available on Github, it’s adoption was almost immediate among a wide spectrum of developer teams at companies of all sizes. “I think when you start a start-up, it's somewhat easy to get the recognition of other start-ups, your peers and your community of developers. And we certainly had that because I've been a long-time open-source contributor, but we actually had something special happen, which was enterprises started adopting it right away,” says Rauch.
Rauch further characterised the tool’s growth as a quiet process, because Next.js was somewhat controversial in that it was focusing on server rendering technology, or what is called multi page applications. At the time in the JavaScript world, there was a lot of excitement about the opposite. Developers were using client compute to create single page applications. “And that's why the uptake was a little quiet in many ways because what happens, companies like Zillow, Trulia, Hulu, companies that we're operating at a very large scale were like, ‘no, I can't do all the compute on the client.’ The community was excited. But the largest companies in the world were adopting it right away,” says Rauch.
He believes that the tool and the company’s rapid adoption and growth was the result of building both a cloud platform and a more effective developer framework and saw that the future of development is starting to blur the lines between cloud and software.
Today, the fast-growing company is near 100 employees with frontend teams at high-profile brands like the Grammy’s, Facebook, McDonald’s, Uber, Trip Advisor and The Washington Post as customers. As a result, the firm has attracted $163 million in financing to date, including its most recent $102 million Series C funding round led by Bedrock Capital, providing the company with $1.1 billion valuation. Other investors include Accel, CRV, Geodesic Capital, Greenoaks Capital, GV, 8VC, Flex Capital, GGV, Latacora, Salesforce Ventures and Tiger Global.
Rauch grew up in Argentina, in the outskirts of Buenos Aires. His parents were industrial and chemical engineers. His dad in particular realised early on that his industry was outdated and that computers were the future. “So that's what led him to invest whatever extra penny he had in building computers that he himself didn't even know how to use. But I kind of lost my interest in hardware very quickly, even though we were interested in the beginning, especially when I discovered open source and the ability to move so fast and collaborate with others on the internet. But really made everything make sense for me was when I discovered JavaScript,” says Rauch.
He became proficient enough to take on freelance developer jobs at an early age and was doing consulting work by the time he was 13. “By the time I was 17 I was in a really reputable public school in Argentina. And it was almost at a fork of my destiny because I could continue down the academic path and continue to get good grades and go to university. Or on this side, every night, I'm talking to engineers at Facebook that had just been created and all these exciting start-ups,” says Rauch. He left high school, created a very popular framework called Socket.IO that Microsoft used when they invented office 365 and Live and started traveling and speaking at conferences, prior to founding Vercel.
As for the future? “I'd love to see an overall transformation on how software gets built. So I think today, first of all, developers are in huge demand. But they can be far more productive than they are today because they don't have to reinvent all this bespoke infrastructure pieces. One of Vercel's objectives is to make the web faster, better and more collaborative. And one of our goals is to lower the barrier of entry. We think that the web front-end development process itself can be far more collaborative and instantaneous than it currently is. So today, if you're a front-end developer, you have to spend probably a week just configuring your development environment, installing all the utilities, all your pillars, all your tool chain. And what's happening is that all software is moving inside the browser, including building software itself,” concludes Rauch.
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