Guillermo Rauch, Founder and CEO of Vercel, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how he decided to focus on building a front-end tool that is fast, reliable, and focuses on the developer experience. Guillermo explains how he discovered that Javascript was the language that set online offerings apart, and also reveals the advice he gives to founders on how to build an effective landing page. Corey and Guillermo discuss the effects of generative AI on developer experience, and Guillermo explains why Vercel had a higher standard for accuracy when rolling out their new AI product for developers, v0. About GuillermoGuillermo Rauch is Founder and CEO of Vercel, where he leads the company’s mission to enable developers to create at the moment of inspiration. Prior to founding Vercel, Guillermo co-founded LearnBoost and Cloudup where he served the company as CTO through its acquisition by Automattic in 2013. Originally from Argentina,Guillermo has been a developer since the age of ten and is passionate about contributing to the open source community. He has created a number of JavaScript projects including socket.io, Mongoose.js, Now, and Next.js.Links Referenced:
Vercel: https://vercel.com/

v0.dev: https://v0.dev

Personal website: https://rauchg.com

Personal twitter: https://twitter.com/rauchg

TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn. I don’t talk a lot about front-end on this show, primarily because I am very bad at front-end, and in long-standing tech tradition, if I’m not good at something, apparently I’m legally obligated to be dismissive of it and not give it any attention. Strangely enough, I spent the last week beating on some front-end projects, and now I’m not just dismissive, I’m angry about it. Here to basically suffer the outpouring of frustration and confusion is Guillermo Rauch, founder and CEO of Vercel, but also the creator of Next.js. Guillermo, thank you for joining me.Guillermo: Great to be here. Thanks for setting me up with that awesome intro.Corey: It’s true, if I were talking to someone who looked at what I’ve done, and for some Godforsaken reason, they wanted to follow in my footsteps, well, that path has been closed, so learning a bunch of Perl early on and translating it all to bad bash scripts and the rest, and then maybe picking up Python isn’t really the way that I would advise someone getting started today. The de facto lingua franca of the internet is JavaScript, whether we like it or not, and I would strongly suggest that be someone’s first language despite the fact that I’m bad at it, I don’t understand it, and therefore it makes me angry.Guillermo: Yeah, it’s so funny because it sounds like my story. And my personal journey was, when I was a kid, I had a—I knew I wanted to hack around with computers, and reverse engineer them, and improve them, and just create my own things, and I had these options for what programming language I could go with. And I tried it all: PHP, Perl, [Mod PHP 00:02:12], [Mod Perl 00:02:13], Apache, LAMP, cgi-bin folders, all the whole nine yards. And regardless of what back-end technology I used, I encountered this striking fact, which was… the thing that can make your product really stand out in a web browser is typically involving JavaScript in some fashion. So, when Google came out with suggestions as you would type in a search box, my young kid Argentinian brain blew up. I was like, “Holy crap, they can suggest, they can read my mind, and they can render suggestions without a full page refresh? What is that magic?”And then more products like that came out. Go