Next.js future is distributed: how @VercelHQ is implementing micro-frontends with Malte Ubl

Hi everyone. Today we have a super guest, someone that can shed some light on how next will implement microns as a next feature. Uh today we have a person that is working for Versell and he worked previously for 11 years in Google two and a half years work as CTO of Verscell. So we have Malt Ubel. Hi Malt. How are you? Very good. It's very early here in California, but uh I'm excited about this. Thank you very much for uh joining us

and I'm sure the community will be super pleased to hear more about uh Versel next microphone, what the future holds about that. Uh I give a very brief introduction about yourself. If you can tell tell us a bit more about uh who you are, what you do etc would be great. Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned I was at Google for 11 years and the first kind of five years of my career there I worked in like very specifically front end infrastructure and the and obviously

that kind of draws the line to my my role today in cell but it's actually very very relevant what I did there for this podcast. Uh the my probably biggest achievement in hindsight is I created whiz which is the front-end framework that basically all consumer product that Google has made over the last 15 years or so um are built on and and much of the older ones also have been backported. So search Gmail like basically everything and

recently uh it was actually announced that this framework whiz is merging with Angular. So it's kind of out in the public. It was it was entirely closed source until very very recently. And the other thing that team did is it was the team that built the micro service architecture for Google. And I would then move on and build the microphone infrastructure for Google in this time frame maybe 2012 13 14ish and which is now very widely deployed and you can imagine that google.com is like

this immense domain that has so many many different applications on it and then you have these like vertical things uh horizontal things like there's the what's called the one Google bar which the thing on top right like because there's this you know unified application navigation to that that spans all these apps. So I've been like solving this problem for quite a while and and excited to to to get a chance now at Versell where it's kind of in a

way I'm trying to do a similar job. It's just that my customers are not purely internal there the entire internet. That's amazing. I mean uh a lot of experience. So for sure this uh interview will be super interesting for everyone. So what's your point of view about micron? So as you said it's been a while that you're working uh with them. So um what do you think about them? Uh do you think that are uh really helpful for companies nowadays especially uh large organization or mid-size organizations?

Yeah. I like so there's one principle for me in software engineering which I I based on a quote from from Eric Schmidt at the time CEO of Google would always say revenue solves all known problems and I don't think that's true that's certainly not true for Google today revenue doesn't solve their antitrust problems but iteration velocity solves all known problem software problems like if you if you because as a professional you you realize you cannot know the

future but you can you know the professional thing then to do is to say okay but I can react to what I'm learning over time and so I have to iterate quickly and I think there is just a scale of software engineering that that you arrive at some point not certainly not everyone's in there where having coarse grain splitting of applications broadly speaking is just something that's almost impossible to avoid and and so that's why I I kind of want to embrace this