Today’s guest is Malte Ubl! Malte is CTO at Vercel, the frontend cloud provider and creator of Next.js, the most popular React framework.
He has also been Engineer Director at Google, where he led Google Search for desktop computers.
🎙️ Episode
You can watch the full episode on Youtube:
Or listen to it on Spotify, Apple, Overcast, or your podcast app of choice.
🥇 Interview Summary
If you are a 🔒 paid subscriber 🔒 you will find my own summary of the interview below.
It’s the 10-minute, handcrafted takeaways of what we talked about, with timestamps to the relevant video moments, for those who don’t have time to sit through the 1-hour chat.
Here is the agenda:
🏗️ Vercel's engineering culture (00:41)
🚀 Development process (05:45)
👥 Team structure and mgmt (12:51)
⚡ Optimizing dev experience (32:44)
🤖 AI and the future of engineering (42:50)
Let’s dive in 👇
1) 🏗️ Vercel's engineering culture (00:41)
Vercel's engineers use the tools they build, creating a natural empathy with users.
This approach allows for intuitive product development without extensive market research. By starting with what they themselves would like, engineers often create solutions that resonate well with their audience.
Basically, the entire organization at Vercel uses their product daily — Malte mentions that CEO Guillermo Rauch has deployed an app on Vercel every single day for the past five years.
So, as we could expect, Vercel is an engineering-heavy company 👇
