StrapiConf Fireside Chat with Pierre Burgy and Guillermo Rauch

i'm pleased to introduce guillermo creator of nextgs and co-founder and ceo of vassal to discuss the future of web developments guillermo thank you so much for being with us today could you give us a quick intro and story on how you ended up working on nextgs in starting vessel absolutely i'm really glad to be here so uh funny thing is four years ago i knew that i wanted to build and enable developers to build better

websites and build a company around that but when we're working the website for the company which at the time was called zeit it was really hard believe it or not to even build a page and publish it online that was taking advantage of all these innovations in the front end world like react components react components came out of facebook they were really great for building widgets like an auto completer type widget but it was really hard to build entire pages and applications with this innovative technologies so

even for that one page that i needed to publish online which was our main website which it was a startup at the time just one page it was really hard to get it started on two fronts one with a framework that made it really easy to generate pages and publish them online and making them reliably auto scale fast but then that other piece of like the deployment platform i wanted to just push and self-serve to all this incredible infrastructure

that was all these innovations that were happening in the cloud i didn't want to spend you know a year setting up a kubernetes cluster infrastructure having to monitor it and so on i was thinking more like this should work more like a cdn so those two things led to the grade of xjs and the versailles platform and the target developer was the front end developer that was innovating on with these new tools technologies frameworks and creating innovative experiences like on top of headless cms like strappy

thanks a lot um and congrats on this amazing achievements next gs is now the fastest growing javascript front-end framework according to the 2020 javascript rising stars with a recent 40 million dollar series b led by top vc you've done pretty well for yourself but in your mind what has been your greatest accomplishments i think there's been a number of things that i'm really proud of that we've accomplished with our team uh it's important to say that even

though i did have influence over the initial ideas of an xjs we hired a ton of people from our community we worked a lot now people call it working in public because of the open source nature of our projects like strappy and next i feel like we've always been working in public so i think one of the things that i'm really proud of is having built a team that came from that open source community that care very deeply about these problems we didn't just recruit

engineers that were i don't know working on you know uh back end or other kinds of things java developers we're just working with our community and building this incredible project uh and actually i would say like more concretely something that when i think about nexjs and i look back one of the things that i'm proud of is that we stayed minimalistic so we stayed we didn't add tons of stuff we could have added you know we could have turned it into like a full stack

uh we're gonna build a database for we could have done so many things but we chose to be very mindful of the surface of the problems that we're gonna take on to have an opportunity to excel uh and that's pan out really well for us because for example when we introduced an xjs four years ago it's really focused on server rendering yeah and then we realized like developers wanted to have the power to choose static or dynamic with great flexibility and then we we