Comment by sholladay

5 years ago

Rich Harris has done a lot of great work. Until esbuild came along, Rollup was the only sane JS bundler for those of us who can’t stand Webpack. Svelte has some interesting concepts, albeit I am planning to stay with React. His code is always interesting to read.

Then there’s Vercel. I was a big advocate for them years ago, back when they were Zeit. I used them in production at multiple companies and I contributed to their CLI to improve its error handling. But they really screwed me as a vendor with changes to their hosting platform and then again with changes to their authoritative DNS service. They broke every promise or expectation they ever set with me and reversed practically every facet of their original philosophy as a platform. They are bordering on being on my “never again” list. I hope Rich is genuinely able to stay independent creatively.

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sholladay

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leerob  5 years ago

Hey, Lee from Vercel. I'm sorry you had a bad experience here. If you want to email lee @ vercel, I'd love to hear what we could have done better.

  • sholladay  5 years ago

    Hi Lee. I appreciate the offer but the simple answer is that Vercel abruptly pivoted away from backend oriented services. That broke everything I built on the Now v1 platform and there wasn't anything to do but switch to other providers. It was stated that migration to Now v2 would be simple but that never materialized in time for the Now v1 shut down. On top of that, I encountered a lot of bugs with the deployment system when the new infrastructure started coming online, where it would auto deploy to data centers that couldn't run Now v1 apps and then the CLI would crash. I tried to be understanding, given you were a startup in a competitive space. It was unfortunate but I decided to at least continue using your domains and DNS features. But then the format of the zeit.world nameservers changed a couple of times and again with relatively short notice. Other frustrations... the domain search & buy page used to be public, now it requires a login for seemingly no reason (trying to keep bots out?). The marketing of early Zeit was all about embracing open standards and now Vercel is basically the exact opposite, with proprietary solutions for running frontend projects being at the heart of the product. I can only guess as to why it unfolded that way, but the transition was extremely rough for people who bought into the original vision. I just logged in now to transfer out some domains I still have in there and discovered that years later you still don't have a way for customers to change their domain's nameservers other than contacting support. That's just user hostile. A lot of people would say that is a dark pattern. I've literally never encountered another registrar that didn't have a simple button to change my domain's nameservers. Having to contact support to do this was excusable when your company was only a year old, but at this point it looks negligent, if not deliberate.

    If you want more details, my contact info is here: https://seth-holladay.com/contact

rudian  5 years ago

"Sane" lol have you ever used it?

It's only sane if you use it raw (i.e. ESM in, UMD out), but add plugins and suddenly you have a slower and less capable webpack with lengthy config.

I'm generally a fan of Rich’s tools but they only look good on the surface generally. Svelte itself changed face 3 times already, with each iteration completely incompatible with the old one.

Be ready for Svelte 4 I guess.

enumjorge  5 years ago

Maybe I'm misreading your comment, but Richard Harris did not create esbuild. Evan Wallace, co-founder of Figma, is the person behind it.