The most exciting thing in this announcement for me is the $1 million committed to open source project sponsorship. More companies that rely on OSS should use some of their funding like this.
Totally agree! I think open-source will be a viable career path in the next few years. One where you don't have to join a company to get paid, but can rather pave your own way.
Of course, you now have investors and you have to keep them happy, but you don't have to give up your autonomy entirely.
Shout out to Netlify. I use it to power my personal webpage using Jekyll and its a delight to work with and the documentation is spot on.
The deployment is very straightforward and gives me a good amount of control.
I applied for a job, got the job offer in April last year, but the week before I started they retracted my job offer due to covid-19. And then they mailed in February this year
yikes. really sorry to hear that. i remember advocating for a hiring freeze in march due to expectation of prolonged recession. we didnt really expect (but maybe should have) that the big offline-to-online shift would result in MORE business, not less.
Honestly, I still did want to work there and they said they would reach out next time a position opened up but this never happened or got lost in the shuffle. I probably should have taken it upon myself to reach out to them and that's a failure on my part for sure.
Oddly, my wife interviewed with Facebook (~7 years ago), got the “no, but we’ll reach out to you if something comes up“, and 2-3 months later they did. She’s been working there ever since.
So well 99% of the time I would say don’t expect to hear back… my n=1 experience says it’s not impossible.
Big companies could handle this so much better. They are going to hire thousands of $role in any given year. Once an applicant gets routed to a particular team, they might not get picked in favor of another candidate, but that doesn't mean they would be a fit for any of the other hundreds or thousands of open positions.
It seems like something an ATS startup could fix, though it also seems hard to address, since your customer would need to be an enterprise which is a hard first-niche for a product.
I recently met the founder of Eightfold.ai at an HR Tech conference, and was surprised to learn how big they are. They solve almost exactly this problem as a “layer” over existing ATS systems.
Circumstances change. Switching jobs isn’t easy. If you find another gig that seems to work, it seems alright.
I also want to argue with the framing of pursuing a job at a company just to work at a company. When I interviewed with startups and I wanted to join, it was not just the company but also where they were at. The same company will change drastically when it goes from 10->100->500->1000 employees etc. The problems they need to solve are different, and so on.
Basically it may not be the same company that originally excited you.
It is disheartening, especially if you get to the latter stages. Many moons ago, it always felt weird when I met someone from HR or Engineering at a company I interviewed at in a conference or a talk and they wave like -
hey Vagrant! How are you doing? How's life? You got around to launching that project? We were so intrigued by it...blah blah blah
It just felt...patronizing. Maybe it's made worse by the fact that the city is tight knit and you're bound to bump into people from the industry. But I can't stand it.
Of course rejection hurts. Some people shrug and let it roll off never to think about it again. Some people get mad. Some people use it as motivation to do bigger things.
The OneGraph acquisition is huge news for the GraphQL community! Netlify betting on GraphQL being a core piece of the JAMStack ecosystem for the foreseeable future is incredible.
Can't wait to see how this evolves Netlify's product direction — just imagine what they could do with OneGraph's tech …
It’s bewildering to me how Netlify, Vercel, Cloudflare and others have convinced the modern crop of developers this approach is fundamentally different than CDN caching and that “serverless” somehow doesn’t qualify as backend.
This. I consider Netlify and Vercel to be more focused versions of AWS for static site hosting. You can host a static site on AWS no problem, but AWS is so massive that a good chunk of your time is going to be spent just wrangling with the AWS services themselves.
What Netlify (and Vercel) did is take all those disparate features across AWS that you use for static site hosting, and package them up with a nice UI and easy access.
I know I'm nitpicking a bit here but it's more accurate to say that it's static HTML, JS, and CSS hosting. If you want to host images you have to solve that yourself. This part is pretty confusing to me given that both Vercel and Netlify have pretty much 1-click solved the rest of static site hosting.
For vercel you can't just throw the images in your `public/` folder or equivalent? I'm almost positive I've done that. Doesn't work for user generated images ofc, though cloudflare has some sort of solution there
Agreed, it's a whole new git based workflow. When I was doing full stack applications 10 years ago, it looked similar in some ways, but it was a lot different to me. I also had to care much more about servers. CDN caching is just one feature.
Obviously but you’re in the same pool of “commit and magically deployed globally” service offering, except I think you’re actually providing value (deploying backend services alongside static content) as opposed to a commit hook and a cache update.
Maybe there's something to this that you don't see? Have you spoken with Netlify/Vercel/Cloudflare users to learn why they love those services so much?
They're basically CPanel on steroids (=orchestrating a whole bunch of servers/services instead of a single server) with low-code features (workers) built in. You can go from nothing to having a demo for some small application in a day or two, while hardly leaving their site. For cloudflare, for example: register domain, set up DNS, deploy "web app" UI as a site, write a quick & dirty API in workers (you can even write it all in-browser!), letting CF handle all the routing and such.
They're similarly pointy-clicky one-stop-shop for fairly complex external and internal networking, on high-tier plans, at least for Cloudflare.
I am very aware of the risks with things like this, but the appeal is clear.
Destliner, you are shadow banned and vouching has stopped working for me so I can't reply, but "git push to deploy" is just CI/CD. I'm not sure what's groundbreaking about that, other than the fact that someone else set it up?
Personally, the CDN aspect of Netlify didn't bother me much at the time. The killer feature was the "git push to deploy". Compared to S3, that was ground breaking.
Yeah I suppose? I think the “git push and it’s magically live” aspect is great. I just wish modern devs understood how the web actually functions so that understanding is transferable instead of thinking it’s all magic.
Unless they have a personal desire to do so, they won't. Most developers are driven by what others are doing and if everyone is building on Netlify and using Cloudflare Workers, they'll just do that and assume they understand.
This will inevitably end with a whole lot of people not having a clue how to do what they think they know how to do when these companies go poof (or are swallowed by private equity).
If they go poof, competitors will take their space. People have decided managed services are worth the cost. Building them is not inordinately complicated. There will always be contenders.
If there are people who understand how to build the replacement. This is a degenerative spiral. I'll be wrong for ten years and then all of a sudden? There's no one around to Superman in and save the day.
They should/can, but not at the expense of understanding how the underlying system works.
Right now, the major players significantly abstract away from "how the web works" which means newer developers don't understand and are being led into a trap. Cute marketing terms like "serverless" confuse developers into thinking there is no server (or even worse, that there's such a thing as a "serverless developer").
> Right now, the major players significantly abstract away from "how the web works" which means newer developers don't understand and are being led into a trap
Well, that argument always goes. Linux users don't know how CPU scheduling works. CPU builders don't know how silicon etching works. The list is endless.
Web developers should build experiences with the best tools available. Apparently, these are the new preferred tools.
I do love that this is literally old man yells at the cloud.
Though in general our profession is built on and about building abstractions.
I don’t expect every 2010s web dev to know the intricacies of memory allocation, nor do I expect every 2020s web dev to know about nginx config or asset cache invalidation.
It’s handy sure, but required no. They’re all abstractions that you learn if and when necessary.
Yup. Paradoxically I find it much easier to understand something when I know the layer inmediately below it.
Middle layers of software stacks are not implemented in a way that makes sense in isolation. There is always a reason why something is done a certain way and that reason usually comes from a lower layer.
For people who love to ask “why”, being forced to understand a single layer of a software stack is mental torture. Those who proclaim something is good because “you don’t have to think about x,y,z” are missing the point. Yes in the near term maybe, but long term its not the best solution.
Have you actually run into developers who think "serverless" means there is no server anywhere? Does anyone think "cloud" means there are no servers? I think -- and maybe I'm wrong -- it's obvious that of course there's a server, it's just not mine to care for.
Love Netlify. Have to migrate soon because we need a visual CMS for marketing to edit the site more visually and "Netlify CMS" is not nearly as mature as Netlify itself, or competitors like CloudCannon.
Netlify: please make the CMS a first-class citizen so we can keep projects on you!
You are aware that any headless CMS works well with netlify, right? (even some less headless ones, but these are easy): Contentful, Sanity, Ghost, Forestry? Our CMS is an open source project that is community maintained these days, not managed by us :)
I tried to publish a very simple static site with Netlify not that long ago (post COVID lockdowns). Just several (~4) plain text (unminified) JS, CSS, and HTML files. There was also a .git directory pointing to a non-GitHub remote, not that it should matter, since I wasn't trying to use Netlify for builds. I just wanted it to do a straightforward deployment on par with FTPing your work to a dumb host. Turns out, this did matter. The Netlify CLI was so thoroughly confused by the presence of this .git subdirectory that it failed hard. Not even a cryptic error or stack trace, the process just up and terminated. It took some poking around before I realized that what the trigger was.
The utter failure to handle what seemed to me to be a straightforward, "hello world" sort of use case did not inspire confidence.
I use Netlify exclusively for all my personal projects. It literally takes like 2 minutes to stand up a site with automated deployments from github. For that alone it's wonderful. I think they're doing serverless functions now - haven't touched them but interested to see what they do there.
Pages has actually been GA since April of this year[1] - since then, we've released support for deploy hooks, redirect/custom header files, GitLab support, and as you mentioned above, a Workers function integration.
We have a really excellent team building Pages, and we still think there's a lot of unexplored territory around Pages/Jamstack and how it interacts with serverless and edge functions. Exciting times!
I’m with you here. CloudFlare’s speed and downright mastery of the CDN is miles ahead of everyone else (I work for one of the clouds), their workers are insanely good and the speed at which they add genuinely brilliant features is astonishing. They are a full cloud now.
Netlify and Vercel are outstanding solutions. But they are not a cloud and I don’t see viability beyond acquisition. Lots of developers using free stuff is great, but only if you can monetize it. Cloudflare has been around a long time, has proven they can monetize and seem to be the emerging “developer cloud” leader.
Any idea which is the cheapest place to host very light very low traffic static sites ('000s)?
I liked Vercel but their account mgmt exec told me that it will cost '000s of $ p.m.
I'm going for a personal VM right now. I'm assuming it can easily host lots of sites. Not sure but I may be in for lots of surprises if the scaling ever happens.
Would be happy to know from more any experienced folks.
One marked downside of all of this growth is that Netlify's paid support products have really deteriorated. If you need a support response in less than 48 hours, your only recourse is to saddle up for their full $2000/mth enterprise support plan. Otherwise, a regular paid account has access to email support which generally has ~48 hour turnaround.
This has bit us several times in the past year - generally only when we've hit a wall that we can't reconcile ourselves (redirects failing to properly shadow, custom domains that need to be manually verified/released, SSL certs that fail to auto provision) and require manual intervention from Netlify. Since each support response requires another 48 hour wait we've had tickets take well over a week to reach full resolution.
Don't get me wrong, we're big fans of Netlify, and we're excited to see them succeed in this space - they would also still be my first recommendation for any hobbyist looking to host a static site. But I no longer believe they're a tenable solution for hosting anything client related or critical unless you can afford the 24k/year for an SLA.
I sure do miss the days when we could hop on livechat with Mathias and Chris and have them kick the servers to fix the certbot!
Big fan of Netlify and also their director of developer experience, Cassidy Williams. She's able to distill "life as a developer" accurately into memes. 'Tis a gift.
Her twitter with best memes: https://twitter.com/cassidoo
Recent interview: https://srcgr.ph/cassidy-williams
Good for them! I am surprised Amazon hadn’t purchase them by now.
I really think Netlify can do something incredible if they can offer an e-commerce solution (Stripe/Square/EasyPost/Shippo) that can compete with Shopify. And probably why Vercel is moving in this direction.
Big cloud providers (and esp. Amazon) can likely build a better service within ±6 months if they wanted to, so I don't think it makes much sense for Amazon/Google/Microsoft to buy Netlify.
As a side note, Github already does a more than competent Netlify competitor for static webpages.
bullshit - AWS has existed for years and their UI is atrocious. Netlify's UI meanwhile is delightful to use and predictable. You can get something up and running in no time flat, even without Netlify experience.
As far as I am concerned, the US is not going to go after tech monopolies outside of maybe Facebook. They are quite literally taking over the world and that’s bringing a lot of money and benefits to US interests. The US is a commerce first country. They will never stand in the way.
If we were doing things right and wanted to really benefit from having these giants around, we'd go 1950s-Japan on them and harness them to drive a broader prosperity-increasing economic engine, while still letting them thrive and grow huge, while guiding them to advance broader economic-strategic goals.
Having them around and so globally dominant is a huge opportunity, and one that won't last forever. But I doubt we'll use it like we could before that time's over.
Netlify Drop - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29254405 - Nov 2021 (86 comments)