Netlify raises $105M and acquires OneGraph | Hacker News Reader

Netlify raises $105M and acquires OneGraph

netlify.com

276 pointsmarc__1106 comments

Related ongoing thread:

Netlify Drop - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29254405 - Nov 2021 (86 comments)

(I work at Netlify)

The most exciting thing in this announcement for me is the $1 million committed to open source project sponsorship. More companies that rely on OSS should use some of their funding like this.

Totally agree! I think open-source will be a viable career path in the next few years. One where you don't have to join a company to get paid, but can rather pave your own way.

Of course, you now have investors and you have to keep them happy, but you don't have to give up your autonomy entirely.

Shout out to Netlify. I use it to power my personal webpage using Jekyll and its a delight to work with and the documentation is spot on. The deployment is very straightforward and gives me a good amount of control.

How about co-operative like structure for open source ?

Isn’t the Apache Foundation exactly that?

How would you see that working?

Years ago I applied to Netlify and went through a pretty lengthy interview process and at the very end it was between me and one other guy.

He got it. Now I'm really bummed I missed out. Hats off to him though. Really happy for Netlify's success, still use them for many projects/clients.

I applied for a job, got the job offer in April last year, but the week before I started they retracted my job offer due to covid-19. And then they mailed in February this year

yikes. really sorry to hear that. i remember advocating for a hiring freeze in march due to expectation of prolonged recession. we didnt really expect (but maybe should have) that the big offline-to-online shift would result in MORE business, not less.

Why not try again?

The equity one would receive now pales in comparison to the equity you'd receive as an early engineer.

> Years ago

You missed the subtle comment. I was replying to the fact that the OP had years to try to find a job at that company.

If they really wanted to work there and they had been that close in the interview process, another round would have likely gotten them in.

This is a common issue that I've seen in the tech world over the years. People fail one time and never try again.

Honestly, I still did want to work there and they said they would reach out next time a position opened up but this never happened or got lost in the shuffle. I probably should have taken it upon myself to reach out to them and that's a failure on my part for sure.

The "we'll reach out to you" is almost never true in practice. It's just a nice way of saying "goodbye."

Agreed that this is usually true.

Oddly, my wife interviewed with Facebook (~7 years ago), got the “no, but we’ll reach out to you if something comes up“, and 2-3 months later they did. She’s been working there ever since.

So well 99% of the time I would say don’t expect to hear back… my n=1 experience says it’s not impossible.

Big companies could handle this so much better. They are going to hire thousands of $role in any given year. Once an applicant gets routed to a particular team, they might not get picked in favor of another candidate, but that doesn't mean they would be a fit for any of the other hundreds or thousands of open positions.

It seems like something an ATS startup could fix, though it also seems hard to address, since your customer would need to be an enterprise which is a hard first-niche for a product.

I recently met the founder of Eightfold.ai at an HR Tech conference, and was surprised to learn how big they are. They solve almost exactly this problem as a “layer” over existing ATS systems.

Super true!

Circumstances change. Switching jobs isn’t easy. If you find another gig that seems to work, it seems alright.

I also want to argue with the framing of pursuing a job at a company just to work at a company. When I interviewed with startups and I wanted to join, it was not just the company but also where they were at. The same company will change drastically when it goes from 10->100->500->1000 employees etc. The problems they need to solve are different, and so on.

Basically it may not be the same company that originally excited you.

That's why I asked the question, "Why not try again?"

I didn't just assume it was because the OP just gave up, even though they admitted so above.

It is disheartening, especially if you get to the latter stages. Many moons ago, it always felt weird when I met someone from HR or Engineering at a company I interviewed at in a conference or a talk and they wave like -

hey Vagrant! How are you doing? How's life? You got around to launching that project? We were so intrigued by it...blah blah blah

It just felt...patronizing. Maybe it's made worse by the fact that the city is tight knit and you're bound to bump into people from the industry. But I can't stand it.

I hear you, it certainly is. Similar is asking a someone out. The people who realize it is just a numbers game, usually end up getting more dates. =)

Some people take this as an opportunity to grow a thicker skin and change their game so they have more chances for success.

Is it a thick skin thing? Maybe. Rejection still hurts even though my reaction now is little more than a shrug.

What was your reaction before?

Of course rejection hurts. Some people shrug and let it roll off never to think about it again. Some people get mad. Some people use it as motivation to do bigger things.

Additionally, if the only reason you are applying to a job is the potential for equity, you're going to be disappointed more often than not.

Life is too short to only work for equity.

The OneGraph acquisition is huge news for the GraphQL community! Netlify betting on GraphQL being a core piece of the JAMStack ecosystem for the foreseeable future is incredible.

Can't wait to see how this evolves Netlify's product direction — just imagine what they could do with OneGraph's tech …

It’s bewildering to me how Netlify, Vercel, Cloudflare and others have convinced the modern crop of developers this approach is fundamentally different than CDN caching and that “serverless” somehow doesn’t qualify as backend.

Netlify and Vercel are frontend developer productivity and workflow tools. The value is not "CDN caching".

This. I consider Netlify and Vercel to be more focused versions of AWS for static site hosting. You can host a static site on AWS no problem, but AWS is so massive that a good chunk of your time is going to be spent just wrangling with the AWS services themselves.

What Netlify (and Vercel) did is take all those disparate features across AWS that you use for static site hosting, and package them up with a nice UI and easy access.

I know I'm nitpicking a bit here but it's more accurate to say that it's static HTML, JS, and CSS hosting. If you want to host images you have to solve that yourself. This part is pretty confusing to me given that both Vercel and Netlify have pretty much 1-click solved the rest of static site hosting.

For vercel you can't just throw the images in your `public/` folder or equivalent? I'm almost positive I've done that. Doesn't work for user generated images ofc, though cloudflare has some sort of solution there

basically do this for sites that are on Netlify too.

Agreed, it's a whole new git based workflow. When I was doing full stack applications 10 years ago, it looked similar in some ways, but it was a lot different to me. I also had to care much more about servers. CDN caching is just one feature.

Does it solve any problems which aren’t self-inflicted by the convoluted JS ecosystem and toolchain?

Yes.

https://i.imgur.com/PF7uxDY.png

What about end user experience?

Also yes. That screenshot doesn't have anything to do with Netlify, it's our own busted app release on our own servers. :D

Obviously but you’re in the same pool of “commit and magically deployed globally” service offering, except I think you’re actually providing value (deploying backend services alongside static content) as opposed to a commit hook and a cache update.

Yeah. I've used Netlify for a few years as a frontend guy and they're awesome.

Weird comment. You kind of miss the point entirely. Serverless is about scale — not about not having a backend.

It’s a CDN with a backend which is attractive. Effortless, infinitely scalable, dynamic web apps.

> Effortless, infinitely scalable, dynamic web apps.

That’s awfully reminiscent of the MongoDB meme.

Maybe there's something to this that you don't see? Have you spoken with Netlify/Vercel/Cloudflare users to learn why they love those services so much?

They're basically CPanel on steroids (=orchestrating a whole bunch of servers/services instead of a single server) with low-code features (workers) built in. You can go from nothing to having a demo for some small application in a day or two, while hardly leaving their site. For cloudflare, for example: register domain, set up DNS, deploy "web app" UI as a site, write a quick & dirty API in workers (you can even write it all in-browser!), letting CF handle all the routing and such.

They're similarly pointy-clicky one-stop-shop for fairly complex external and internal networking, on high-tier plans, at least for Cloudflare.

I am very aware of the risks with things like this, but the appeal is clear.

Destliner, you are shadow banned and vouching has stopped working for me so I can't reply, but "git push to deploy" is just CI/CD. I'm not sure what's groundbreaking about that, other than the fact that someone else set it up?

It's not fundamentally different.

It is a nice, managed solution for it where someone else takes care of it for you.

It doesn't need to be revolutionary to be worth paying for.

Personally, the CDN aspect of Netlify didn't bother me much at the time. The killer feature was the "git push to deploy". Compared to S3, that was ground breaking.

Convenience blinds.

Yeah I suppose? I think the “git push and it’s magically live” aspect is great. I just wish modern devs understood how the web actually functions so that understanding is transferable instead of thinking it’s all magic.

Unless they have a personal desire to do so, they won't. Most developers are driven by what others are doing and if everyone is building on Netlify and using Cloudflare Workers, they'll just do that and assume they understand.

This will inevitably end with a whole lot of people not having a clue how to do what they think they know how to do when these companies go poof (or are swallowed by private equity).

If they go poof, competitors will take their space. People have decided managed services are worth the cost. Building them is not inordinately complicated. There will always be contenders.

If there are people who understand how to build the replacement. This is a degenerative spiral. I'll be wrong for ten years and then all of a sudden? There's no one around to Superman in and save the day.

So things shouldn't be simpler, faster and easier to use?

They should/can, but not at the expense of understanding how the underlying system works.

Right now, the major players significantly abstract away from "how the web works" which means newer developers don't understand and are being led into a trap. Cute marketing terms like "serverless" confuse developers into thinking there is no server (or even worse, that there's such a thing as a "serverless developer").

I'm working on this problem right now: https://github.com/cheatcode/joystick. I know I sound like a curmudgeon when I say this stuff but it's a serious problem that will have dire consequences later (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko).

> Right now, the major players significantly abstract away from "how the web works" which means newer developers don't understand and are being led into a trap

Well, that argument always goes. Linux users don't know how CPU scheduling works. CPU builders don't know how silicon etching works. The list is endless.

Web developers should build experiences with the best tools available. Apparently, these are the new preferred tools.

There is no trap.

You just made my point. Watch the Jonathan Blow talk I linked, he calls out (in detail) exactly what you just said.

I do love that this is literally old man yells at the cloud.

Though in general our profession is built on and about building abstractions.

I don’t expect every 2010s web dev to know the intricacies of memory allocation, nor do I expect every 2020s web dev to know about nginx config or asset cache invalidation.

It’s handy sure, but required no. They’re all abstractions that you learn if and when necessary.

I'm 33.

37. Very glad I'll have a long career fixing broken "apps" when web devs no longer have a clue how TCP or HTTP works.

Hell, many don't know about tons of HTML features, many of which are literally decades old at this point. "Web" dev indeed.

You can be an old man at 33, I’ve met plenty in this industry.

Congratulations. That doesn't disqualify my point.

Yup. Paradoxically I find it much easier to understand something when I know the layer inmediately below it.

Middle layers of software stacks are not implemented in a way that makes sense in isolation. There is always a reason why something is done a certain way and that reason usually comes from a lower layer.

For people who love to ask “why”, being forced to understand a single layer of a software stack is mental torture. Those who proclaim something is good because “you don’t have to think about x,y,z” are missing the point. Yes in the near term maybe, but long term its not the best solution.

Have you actually run into developers who think "serverless" means there is no server anywhere? Does anyone think "cloud" means there are no servers? I think -- and maybe I'm wrong -- it's obvious that of course there's a server, it's just not mine to care for.

Yes, I've worked with them 1-on-1.

Love Netlify. Have to migrate soon because we need a visual CMS for marketing to edit the site more visually and "Netlify CMS" is not nearly as mature as Netlify itself, or competitors like CloudCannon.

Netlify: please make the CMS a first-class citizen so we can keep projects on you!

(I work for netlify).

You are aware that any headless CMS works well with netlify, right? (even some less headless ones, but these are easy): Contentful, Sanity, Ghost, Forestry? Our CMS is an open source project that is community maintained these days, not managed by us :)

Thank you for the list! For anyone interested, apparently Forestry is going to eventually be sunset in favor of Tina, but seems to be built by the same team: https://twitter.com/forestryio/status/1386274017187975168

NetlifyCMS has worked well for me, but I think Tina is what i'm going to try next. It's a good time for headless CMS options, so many to choose from!

I love NetlifyCMS but it sounds like you may be interested in what we're doing at tina.io. Contact me if you'd like a quick demo scott[at]tina.io

Wow! Very nice, real-time preview is rad.

Link to save you a click https://tina.io/

Strongly agree. I created an awesome integration between Netlify and our no-code platform WeBase [1] to solve this exact problem.

I believe Netlify could grow even more if they embraced some form of "no-code" website editing in their offering or directly partnered with us.

But what do I know? I am just sitting here watching Webflow gobble up this market! :-)

Congrats to the Netlify guys on this raise! Maybe we should apply for their new investment program.

[1] https://www.webase.com

You can use WordPress with a full site editing enabled theme providing the visual builder, and host a static version on Netlify.

Check this out: https://lokl.dev/

I tried to publish a very simple static site with Netlify not that long ago (post COVID lockdowns). Just several (~4) plain text (unminified) JS, CSS, and HTML files. There was also a .git directory pointing to a non-GitHub remote, not that it should matter, since I wasn't trying to use Netlify for builds. I just wanted it to do a straightforward deployment on par with FTPing your work to a dumb host. Turns out, this did matter. The Netlify CLI was so thoroughly confused by the presence of this .git subdirectory that it failed hard. Not even a cryptic error or stack trace, the process just up and terminated. It took some poking around before I realized that what the trigger was.

The utter failure to handle what seemed to me to be a straightforward, "hello world" sort of use case did not inspire confidence.