In Q1 2026, I closed a 30% compensation increase to join Vercel’s framework team as a senior engineer — 14 months after picking up Next.js 15’s release candidate, and 6 months after shipping my first production Next.js 15 app that cut our team’s infrastructure bill by $22k/month. This is the unvarnished retrospective: no hype, just benchmarked code, real-world metrics, and the exact steps that moved the needle.

🔴 Live Ecosystem Stats

⭐ vercel/next.js — 139,247 stars, 30,993 forks

📦 next — 158,013,417 downloads last month

⭐ vercel/vercel — 15,403 stars, 3,550 forks

Data pulled live from GitHub and npm.

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