How Engineers and Team Leads Run Vercel in 2025: Faster Shipping with Less Friction!

When developers talk about Verscell, they usually mention one thing, and that's that it just works. But what does that mean in real terms? How are teams from solo builders to engineering leads using Verscell today? What does it make easier? What does it unlock? We talked to developers across the ecosystem to find out how Versel shows up in their actual workflows. Here's James Quick on what's top of mind for him right now. Versal pre-rendering is something that's like been talked about for a while. It's been experimental for a little bit, but that's been kind of a game changer on how we build applications. like we've had streaming for a while, but it still

requires on a technical side, you still have to make a full round trip to the server wherever your application is deployed versus in the future with PPR, you can deploy that static shell on a CDN, it's replicated all across the world and then still be able to stream in the asynchronous data. So, you get the best of both worlds really. And so, it's kind of a combination of all the best practices that have been evolving the last couple years all in one platform. And how Versell like happens to do that to stitch the static CDN part with like streaming and stuff from the server, I don't know. It's really cool, but I don't have to worry about it. I

just add a few lines of config and it works. That mix of power and simplicity comes up again and again, especially when the platform fades into the background and just lets you build. For smaller teams and solo devs, that simplicity shows up in the speed of shipping. For them, Versell is often the fastest path from idea to reality. Definitely on the VZ team, the feature that we use the most and that I'm personally most excited about is just our native feature flags. So on Vzero, every time we release a new feature, instead of having to have a big complicated launch calendar or launch

schedule, we just throw that behind a feature flag, keep pushing PRs however we want without necessarily affecting the user experience while we develop the feature. When we're ready to beta test, it goes out directly to customers by just flipping it on for a select group of customers and for Verselians internally to dog food the product. And then when we're ready to launch, we launch the feature and you know it's software development bugs come up anytime something bad does happen instead of having to roll back. Another great versell feature we can just turn off the feature flag temporarily push a hot fix and then turn it back on. The Versel dashboard and Versel

deployment features is just amazing. It just makes your life easier as a developer. What are you using specifically with the deployment to help y'all out? I use GitHub. Yeah, because you you you're able to connect your GitHub to Versel. So that's the good thing. You can straight connect your GitHub to Versel and do all your deployment from the terminal. Anytime you push a new commit, you get a live preview branch that also gets deployed. So you can test it. That's a big one. What happens when you go from a team of one to a team of 40? That's where

developer experience really matters. Yeah. The biggest thing for me that my team uses is getting rid of the queue for your deployments. The way we do it at city is we branch off of our main branch. Then we push that branch of course and then forcell automatically creates a preview deployment, but when you have 40 developers working on the website at once, that queue gets backed up for those branches. So not having to wait for the queue is going to be

incredible. Yeah, absolutely. What I'm excited about is what you are going into when you choose Nex.js to deploy Versel as a platform, right? Uh people often make those comparisons with Versel amongst other providers perhaps Cloudflare, HWS or maybe your on prem architecture. What I really think is the value is all those things that you get out of the box or with little to no configuration. uh like the stage rollouts for example huge thing I guess uh being able to release your application gradually uh combine

that with real user monitoring observe how it behaves how it performs and decide on the next steps that's really awesome and I think the reason we're not doing that every time is because this is actually hard to do and the whole infrastructure architecture you have to build it yourself or combine a lot of tools together that's what we often do for our clients but obviously again the fact that it comes out of the makes everyone's life easier. If you're using like NextJS with React, right, you definitely want to have your components organized in a way that