I had my "Vercelaversary" this past week and I wanted to take a moment to reflect (and share, in case anyone else finds it interesting).
Let's take a look at my first year at Vercel.
Disclaimer
I want to be clear up front that this is not an "ALL HAIL TRIANGLE" post (although I do think the meme is hilarious). I'm deeply curious and suspicious of the things I associate myself with by nature. I don't think Vercel is perfect or untouchable, same as anything else.
I'm more than happy to rock the boat or voice my dissent if I think we're doing something wrong, no matter who or where the directive came from. A lot of the time, I find out I'm wrong, anyway, and learn something new.
I'd also be more than happy to leave and go back to running my own business if I felt like we weren't working for the benefit of the Web and its' citizens. I choose to work at Vercel because I believe in the mission to build a better Web. My and Vercel's vision of that tend to line up pretty closely.
Today, I'm thankful because my experience has matched my expectations so far. Can that change in the future? Sure! But, today, I'm revelling in the good vibes so I want to jot some things down.
With that out of the way, let's go!
How I got here
Before Vercel, I ran my own small agency while I played professional baseball. I had never worked in tech or held a "real job."
At the time, I was coming back from what turned out to be a career-ending injury. One day, I happened to run into Lee's blog post about DevRel at Vercel. I followed the call-to-action at the bottom for folks who were interested in Vercel DevRel.
I laughed as I hit send on the email. I wasn't even looking for a job at the time. I'd been a Vercel user for a few years and liked the product. But I'd seen the recent hires: this company was picking up all-stars. But, somehow, I'm writing this post today.
My job hunt added up to:
- 0 intent (at least to start)
- 0 formal job applications
- 0 formal resumes
- 1 three-paragraph email
- 1 take-home writing assignment
- 3 interviews
Suddenly, I was working at a company I thought had something to do with the future of the internet.
I'm spoiled and I know it
I'm perfectly aware of the lengthy, grueling job hunts that some folks are on these days and I feel for them. I've had folks ask me "So, how did you get a job at Vercel?" and...well, I don't have a great answer.
Spoiled but not "spoiled rotten"
I wish I could make myself more useful to the community in the "how to get a job" conversation but I honestly don't believe it's my place. There are people with a lot of experience in this area so I'll defer to them.
The only way I think I can help that conversation is by doing the best I can with the opportunity I've been given. If you want to see my work, read some articles on the Vercel Engineering Blog; I either write or edit most of those. I do a bunch of other stuff but the articles on our blog are what you'll be able to find publically attributed to me.
I love my work
Like I mentioned, I get to work on something I care deeply about - and I realize not everyone can say that.
Again, the only way I can think of bringing fairness to the lengthy-job-hunt folks is to do the best I can. Luckily, if I do that at Vercel, I can hopefully make a big impact on other developers and improve their work and personal lives.
The people around me are amazing
I'm also spoiled when it comes to who I get to work with. Due to the unique needs of my current position, I'd estimate I've worked with or talked to ~150 of our 400 people, whether in Slack or in-person.
Interestingly, I haven't met someone at Vercel that I can't get along with.
Yes, I'm serious. No, I'm not exaggerating. And, no, I don't have a great explanation for it. I just know it is what it is. 😁
In addition to being great to be around, our people are also so, so skillful. The collective breadth and depth of engineering knowledge at Vercel is remarkable and stands out in my mind - but the same goes for the folks in our other departments that I've interacted with.
Making the most of it by learning everything
Like I said, I do what I can to show up and show out every day - but I also make a big point out of absorbing everything I can from the people around me. Here are a few of the many things I've learned.
I need to be 90% of myself
I've never been apologetic about being completely myself. However, when I'm working with other people, I need to be courteous and respectful such that everyone has a levelset to operate inside of.
An example from my personality that I'll use is that I'm really informal. Like "show up to your black-tie wedding in swim trunks and flip flops" informal. But my extreme informality can hurt my ability to work with other people when I use it in the wrong context.
I'm from Southern California, and I surf, so my natural instinct is to call everyone "dude." My grandma is "dude" and my dog is "dude." For me, "dude" has no age, gender, race, nothing; everyone that I like is dude.
Like I said, my only job experience was playing sports. When you play sports, you mess around a lot to stay loose while you compete. But that's a different stage in a different environment with different needs to create teamwork. There are some things that certainly carry over (for instance, thing I described in my React Miami talk).
I quickly recognized that I needed to switch it up a little bit for my new context. Don't get me wrong, though; I'm still me. This past week, I dropped this elite edit to tell Evil Rabbit that I think he's the GOAT (because he is).
Shoutout to GrahamTheDev for the "90% of yourself" expression. Great turn of phrase so I'm borrowing it. 😁
I need to use social media
I've never used social media much and I still keep my usage quite low. But, for professional reasons, I've adapted to using social media for amplifying things that I'm interested in.
I'm finding that, luckily, the very thing I'm interested in (helping developers make the Web better) has viral potential. Some of my best tweets (1, 2, 3) in my young "Twitter career" have been things that help people.
I guess I should do plugs at this point, right?
Next.js is crazy powerful
I've been "the Next.js person" amongst my friends even before I started working at Vercel; I usually knew the answer to their questions. But, wow, Next.js is capable of so much more than I realized.
I've been enjoying continuing to learn new Pages Router tricks and picking up the new patterns of the App Router.
Enterprise is a world I had no idea about
Like I said, I've never held a "real" job, including as a developer, so I didn't know about the seriousness of the stacks that some of you deal with. I only ever made one site for a client using a painful stack. After that, I specifically opted out of any contract that used legacy technologies. I had the luxury of making choices for my mental health so I did.
At Vercel, I get to talk to and help developers from one-person startups to Fortune 100s. The tech talked about on Twitter and "the thing you try to build at work" are often different universes.
I've learned and will continue to learn more about enterprise use cases to try to help more developers. One recent example was helping an enterprise customer with their Turborepo where we cut their build times by ~80% for most builds! The developer pain that alleviated meant so much to their team and I'm so proud to have had a hand in that.
Going forward
Looking to the future, I'm excited for what's next.
In particular, I've been enjoying my time doing interim Turborepo DevRel duties while we don't have a full-time person on board. In my current role, I'm content-focused with a heavy emphasis on writing - but I think I'm really starting to fall in love with the idea of being a true DevRel.
My favorite days are the ones where I get to:
- answer questions in the Turborepo Discord
- write docs
- make a video
- help a Vercel customer with their setup on a support call
- help someone with their pipeline on Twitter
- support our salesfolks on another sales call
- and finish the day with a little bit of API design discussion
Time will tell what the future holds! But, today, I'm feeling grateful.
Thanks for reading.