Vite 5.0, Netlify's Image CDN, and Xata vs Neon

When I began writing this week's newsletter Sam Altman was CEO of OpenAI. When I finished gathering the product updates he was meeting with the board and getting his job back. And now as I hit send, he's an employee at Microsoft.

Who knows? By the time you pen and read this, maybe I'll be the CEO of OpenAI. I'll keep you updated!

Let's get into it...

Hot Product Launch

Build tool Vite released version 5.0.

The team reports monster growth this year - "npm downloads per week jumped from 2.5 million to 7.5 million". Webpack still has 5x the downloads, however during the same 12 month period growth of webpack has stagnated in usage while Vite has been gaining.

Vite 5.0 announcement

NPM Trends - Vite vs webpack

Backend Products

✨ Grafbase will sunset their database product on December 15th and will instead focus on their API gateway.

Grafbase recommends "using modern database providers like Neon, PlanetScale, MongoDB, EdgeDB, Turso or Fauna instead".Related - Grafbase recenlty introduced support for Apollo Federation subgraphs and the @defer directive. That team is fit and focused!

✨ TimescaleDB "added a vectorized query pipeline that makes Single Instruction, Multiple Data (SIMD) vectorization on our hybrid row columnar storage a reality for PostgreSQL".

Enterprise Watch

Each week for Enterprise Watch I highlight a move that will help a devtools company win larger customers. You'd think with 2023's "pivot to profitability" in our industry that I would have many options for each newsletter, but I don't. Every launch featured this week is hobby tier.

So instead of an enterprise-focused move, I submit to you an interview with Nikita Shamgunov, CEO of serverless database neon. Shamgunov spoke with Dev Propulsion Labs and talked about the need for tech companies to quickly reach a $20 million run rate.

Compare his interview with Monica Sarbu, the CEO of neon's competitor, Xata. She talks about the unique value prop of her startup in a crowded market.

Monica Sarbu of Xata interview (YouTube)

Nikita Shamgunov of neon interview (YouTube)

Front-End Products

✨ Netlify launched an image CDN that enables developers to "resize, crop, and reformat any image" with a URL-based API.

The engineer who led this effort, Matt Kane is a talented former colleague of mine. He also created unpic, a "cross-framework component for responsive, high-performance images using image CDNs".

DevOps Products

✨ GitHub brings Copilot AI to their CLI. Use cases include: finding the right command to perform a task, and explaining an unfamiliar command.

Need help creating case studies about your best customers? Hit "reply" on this email and let's talk. - Hashim Warren