My biggest accomplishment of 2022 was not my own, but the collective work of folks on my teams at Vercel. They've chosen to join me on this ambitious journey to make the web faster. I'd like to share the internal Slack message I wrote to celebrate their amazing work:
Happy new year! What better way to start 2023 than to celebrate the work the Developer Experience teams accomplished in 2022:
- Our monthly active community members grew by 66%, as measured by activity on Twitter, Discord, GitHub, and more. Our teams play a key role in helping grow, educate, and interact with members of the community. We even helped many folks land jobs from our Next.js job board.
- We helped engage and answer questions from the community, resulting in Discord growing 2x in size, Reddit (/r/nextjs) growing 3x in size, and Next.js being one of the top tags on StackOverflow with 96% growth. This is largely a reverse kudos to the Next.js team!
- The DevRel team hosted community meetups in New York, Austin, and San Francisco. We also spoke at 15 events, meeting with thousands of developers across the frontend community.
- It was a company wide effort, but we played a major part in Next.js Conf, which 55,000+ attended and 110,000+ registered. Delba, Lydia, and I were part of the keynote, Delba and I hosted the preshow, Hassan helped organize and select our 28 amazing community speakers, and the rest of the team was involved in various other ways.
- We supported many different product launches across Vercel, including Next.js (v13, v12.3, v12.2, v12.1), Edge Middleware, Edge Functions, Edge Config, Vercel Analytics, Build Output API, Turbopack, Vercel OG Image Generation, Comments for Preview Deployments, and more. Depending on the launch, we help out with early testing of features, providing feedback on the API, or reviewing content / messaging for the launch.
- Our team helps write and approve content for social media. In 2022, we saw Twitter followers grow by 32%, YouTube subscribers grow by 78% (~1.5M views, up 250% from last year), and LinkedIn followers grow by 145%. We can't take full credit, though, so kudos to the rest of y'all for creating products and content folks want to try and learn about.
- Thousands of tweets and hundreds of direct messages later, we spent a considerable amount of time “digging deep” with customers to gather feedback on Vercel and Next.js and relay that feedback back to the team.
- We launched a brand new free Next.js course, teaching the foundations of React and Next.js for beginners to get started. It's been continually maintained and updated throughout the year, based on community feedback. Hard to fathom, but the Next.js
/learncourses have had 17 million page views in 2022. Kudos to Delba! - Our Vercel product documentation has had some major upgrades, including: framework-aware dynamic content, JavaScript/TypeScript toggles, improved search accuracy, a new table of contents, as well as refactoring many different pages and beginning to restructure the information architecture of the main navigation.
- We helped update a number of webpages, including: /blog (categories and new design), /customers (industry pages and new design), /help (improved search and new design), /guides (searching and filtering), /templates (brand new, over 100+ templates), and more.
And a few shoutouts…
- Steph created a written + video course on SvelteKit, also helping amplify the well-received SvelteKit 1.0 launch. Along the way, she also created SvelteKit Commerce as part of the course – a fantastic template for folks to get started with SvelteKit 1.0. Great work, Steph!
- Steven created the Vercel Platforms Starter Kit, enabling companies of all sizes to build multi-tenant applications on Vercel. Hashnode is now our most popular platform on Vercel, with almost 30,000 custom domains added. He believed in this template so much, he built an entire open-source Bitly alternative with it. Now that's dogfooding!
- Hassan built our incredible image gallery template, used to show photos from Next.js Conf 2022. It features many nice UI touches, like images with placeholders, lazy loading, and size optimization. There's keyboard support, direct URLs (e.g.:
/p/2) and more. The quality of this template is what we aspire to achieve with all of our examples, and Hassan managed to also uncover and relay some important product feedback back about Next.js and the image component. - Lydia created a blog, video, and full tutorial on how to create your own web framework, built on top of Vercel's Build Output API. This was a very ambitious project and showcased Lydia's expertise as a creator and engineer. Her writing has been incredibly detailed and illustrated, with folks saying it's “one of the best I read this year”.
- Delba has single-handedly re-written the vast majority of the Next.js documentation for the new
appdirectory (beta) docs. It's some of the best docs I've ever seen. Not only are there new overviews for fundamentals like routing, rendering, and data fetching, she's also designed and added many illustrations to visualize concepts. Many of these docs built off her previous work on the Layouts RFC. - Rich has laid the groundwork for many future product docs improvements, including my favorite which is the framework-aware code blocks and content sections in the docs. With this, we'll be able to make strides towards customers having a preferred framework selected and remembered across Vercel, so the docs are always in the context of your favorite framework syntax. Well done!
- Michael joined just a few months ago to lead the DevRel team and has already shipped an incredible post on moving from React + Express + Webpack to Next.js, resulting in removing 20,000+ lines of code and 30+ dependencies. The post has been well received by the community. He's a fantastic leader and I'm thrilled to see him grow, mentor, and lead the DevRel team.
Incredibly proud of everything y'all have accomplished – onward to 2023!