2 min read
As a remote-first company, we're lucky to be minimally affected by recent events. Outside of our regular work, we're doing our best to support one another and our families — hosting virtual game nights, zoom hangouts, group meditation, and regular check-ins.
We also recognize that we have an opportunity — no, an obligation — to help our communities in any way we can. So today, we want to step aside from our typical product-focused content and highlight some recent projects from developers in our Next.js and Vercel community.
Our community has built 2,500+ COVID-19 related sites generating over 150 million requests in the past 72 hours — providing critical information and awareness, helping prevent further outbreaks, and giving us tools for keeping each other safe. This blog post is dedicated to these inspiring efforts.
Those are only a sample of all the projects we've seen. Particularly interesting are sites tracking the numbers in specific countries, such as Italy, Czech Republic, Peru, and The Philippines.
Link to headingA Note on Preparedness
COVID-19 caught all of us off-guard when we were least expecting it. Perhaps the biggest lesson it has taught the world is to constantly be prepared.
The preparedness of our hospitals alone is not enough to navigate an emergency of this scale. As developers, we must work to support our heroic doctors and nurses, providing timely access to actionable information and advice. And in a pandemic like this, we depend on our ability to rapidly create new ways to connect and work together, while maintaining physical distance.
Lachlan Campbell, creator of predictcovid.com mentions on their site: Critical lack of access to COVID-19 testing across the country prevents us from knowing exactly how many people are infected.
No one saw this coming. Despite that, our developer community has risen to this challenge, leveraging the internet to unlock new ways to connect, inform, and share. It’s inspiring, and we're incredibly proud to have played a small role in enabling these achievements. This is the goal we have always been working towards — empowering every developer to launch, iterate, and ship new products quickly.
Link to headingConclusion
We look forward to when this pandemic is a distant memory, although we know the effects will echo for years and fundamentally change the way we live and work. Apart from supporting our developer community, we are contributing to various charities globally to reduce the impact on those most vulnerable to the fallout of this disease. We encourage our community to do the same.
If you're working on a COVID-19 related project and need assistance, don't hesitate to reach out.
We are here for you!
In solidarity,
The Vercel Team
A huge shoutout to the creators behind the incredible projects mentioned in this blog post, as well as numerous others who created COVID-related projects this past week: Lachlan Campbell, Weiwei, Jess Mei, William Felker, Bing Yang, Ivan Aksamentov, Nicholas Noll, Richard Neher, Jan Albert, Robert Dyrdak, Sagar Chauhan Julie McMurry, Monica Munoz-Torres, Scott Teesdale, Dr. Melissa Haendel, Benjamin F. E. Lange, Nicole Vasilevsky, Sean Markey, 1Point3Acres, shGeum, Nukbal, and Youngmin Oh.
Special thanks to Evil Rabbit, Chris Leishman, and Basement for their contributions towards this blog post.