What is the value of utilizing end-to-end web development solutions, such as Vercel, for optimizing the web development process?

When you're doing JavaScript web development today, you have to build your package to be ready to be hosted in something like Vercel. You could store it on S3, a file hosting thing. But the step of building your package can take a couple of minutes based on how big the application is, so you don't develop your application -- like coding it and making changes -- and then do a full build every single time.

Instead, on your development machine you have a developer server where, whenever you make a change, the updates happen in a sub-second timeframe so that you can quickly iterate and see the changes that are happening quickly. Generally, that development environment and production environment look a little bit different, so you are running two different commands: a build command for production and a local development command for the local development. To access the codebase locally when you do that local development environment, you spin up a local server, which you access on your machine. It's technically only accessible on your machine, though there are things that you can do to make your local environment accessible to a remote machine and whatnot.

Vercel and Next have really invested in that as an augmented service. It’s not a service per se, but Next lets you share your local development environment with someone remotely, which is something that normally you would have to use an external service to do. The value of what Next is doing is they're making the development environment part of the Vercel ecosystem, because you need a development environment regardless. If you're a JavaScript engineer working on an application, you need to host the application locally in some way. Next is just really trying to consume and eat all of the touchpoints that involve that. Then when you do the deployment, that again is a separate value ecosystem. If you weren't using Next, you wouldn't use the Next builder; you would use something like React, Vue or maybe Svelte or something like that. But the big thing is that they're building the tooling in the places where there are things that are inevitable.

Going back to your question about, “There's Next, and there was Firebase, and what's popular.” A couple of other things that are sexy that are coming out are Svelte, which is like the anti-React world. Basically, React solved the problem for people who had been doing web development up to then. And people who were coming directly into web development without familiarity with React were basically looking at React, super confused, like “Why are these things the way they are?”

They were missing the context of what problem these things solved, so introducing these abstractions was making things more complicated than people needed. Whereas in contrast to React, the jQuery world, say, was just like, “You see what you get, and you don't have to look too far beyond that.” Things that were important for people who migrated to React were like, how do you create a fast-performing JavaScript application? That’s what people were trying to do -- the virtual DOM updating data quickly -- and that kind of stuff was hard. So React made that easy. Now people are like, “Hey, we're not creating data-intensive applications.” There are people who just want simple build packages or simple small applications to minimize the actual JavaScript payload that they're deploying.

There are aesthetics that people want to optimize for or trade-offs that people are looking for, which creates the potential for new frameworks to emerge. One example is Astro, which is a framework that's interesting. Again, it allows you to minimize the amount of JavaScript you send to the client side. Svelte is another one, just like an end-to-end JavaScript. There are different aesthetics or reasons that people in different environments may want to try different things out. But it's almost like a reaction to the last generation or the current modes of doing things results in the next thing. It’s evolution within the ecosystem in a sense.