0.6 - Next.js with Guillermo Rauch

foreign [Music] welcome back perfect peeps I have Guillermo Roush with me today I'm very excited so kind of the CEO of zeitz and if you don't know zeit um also the Creator or one of the maintainers main maintainers of next.js so super excited about this one uh let's thank you thank you for having me

there we go now I can see you so uh first up um kind of just tell me a little bit about yourself if you're kind of on a journey through uh zeit and that creation that was uh 2015-ish yeah so the idea for the company kind of started in uh uh late 2015 my company my previous startup had gotten acquired by WordPress um I have a interestingly enough my past

has been all JS a lot of front end uh which is what led to the creation of next but also once upon a time I was a PHP uh developer I was part of the symphony community of uh the WordPress I was a WordPress uh plug-in developer um and later on we developed a lot of technology in the JS space uh specifically socket IO uh I contributed the mood tools um Library

um and my journey just took uh a big shift over to the JS world uh my company at the time was focused on cloud file sharing which is not too distant from what we're doing today but more obviously focused on hosting and deploying but um at the time we were I met with Matt the founder of Wordpress and we were going to partner on providing Cloud infrastructure for them and then later on we decided you know like WordPress is

going to be such a big client for us that let's just merge the companies um and then um you know I was kind of getting uh um um just not bored but I was feeling like I could start something to help a lot of people um and I left work president as I had all kinds of ideas for um basically doing what I did with socketeo which was uh providing a great developer experience but also enabling new things

and better ways of building products so uh for a while we started experimenting with all kinds of products and services that could help developers and then I think our biggest kind of moment was when we started building a front end and we noticed how react was quite painful to get started with to build a website or an app

so you're and you're kind of messing with like create react app and you're like oh that's just well even even slightly before that okay that's a that's a very interesting uh Point uh because even before create react app existed like people were already super excited about react right and now we take create reactive for granted and and that uh it's part of the S FB of the Facebook sort of um family but uh it was even more painful than than that before right and

and but people were excited about react because of the programming model mostly and it was still at that it was still being presented as it's the v in MVC sure but we're like no you know what like we love Ria we love this programming model we work in our on our simple website it was funny it was like the landing page for zyde which was just a way of getting emails and then sending them over to MailChimp but I wanted to build the whole thing with react and it was like Wow building one page