Homage
First off, some homage: a wide range of players and communities are involved in accelerating the transition to sustainable energy. The Open Source ecosystem is among them. So, OSS peeps worldwide: I appreciate what y'all do to inspire innovation and collaboration.
A special opportunity of my career at Tesla, has been being able to foster on-going collaboration and partnership opportunities, both within and outside of the company, which help us to accelerate our mission. That's why, I’m excited to share that we’re back with our Frontend Meetup Series, and we’re kicking things off with a follow-up on the popular Next.js talk from last year.
I am also delighted to welcome back Lee Robinson, VP of Developer Experience at Vercel, to this meetup. I'll try to share an update soon on how the meetup went and what we learned (it's a few hours away).
Manny is very easy to work with, and his penchant for knowledge-sharing has a force-multiplier effect on any group effort he’s involved in.
In the meantime, if you're curious where and what we've been building with Next.js at Tesla, here's a glimpse...
Our Energy Configurators are now powered by Next.js via our custom scaffold/starter kit. The Energy Configurators allow our customers to design their own energy system, then securely place their order online. Their UI/X is intentionally similar to our vehicle configurators.
Manny played a crucial role in onboarding Tesla's energy teams to Next.js. He excels at unblocking individuals and connecting them with the resources needed to solve their problems.
The Energy Team did a great job with their implementation and I was more than happy to help them out along the way with some guidance. This has been something that I've been wanting to do for a while, and I'm glad that we were able to finally make it happen.
Our Red Team's very own website was recently rebooted with Next.js, MDX and the Tesla Design System using our Next.js scaffold. While it's on the more simplistic side of things - e.g. it's not the size or complexity of tesla.com - it's a great example of how we're offering efficient, consistent and scalable tools for teams across the company to use no matter what their needs are. This allows folks to use more of their time to focus on what matters most: creating great products and accelerating our mission.
Our illustrious designer, Austin, created a snazzy newsletter builder for our Tesla Design System.
Manny's Next.js scaffold that he created was instrumental in enabling me to build an email builder app for TDS' biweekly newsletter.
On a related note, our TDS website is also getting rebuilt with Next.js, MDX, etc.
There's a lot more that we're building with Next.js at Tesla, and also exploring other incredibly, promising frameworks, e.g. Remix, which I'll go more in-depth about in a future post.
Until then, I'll highlight that a lot of the work that we're researching and doing with OSS in general and our own custom, internal solutions is part of our Frontend Platform Initiative, which supplements our goals with TDS and aims to help us drive efficiency, innovation, improve developer (and overall people) experience and accelerate our mission.
Tip: Curious what other digital products we might have onboarded to
Next.js? View the source code of any page and look for _next as a giveaway
that it's using Next.js (or not).