I already wrote about my personal projects over the last summer, but figured I should finally write about my internship at Vercel! This post has been sitting in my drafts for a while, so I decided to just publish it. Like my last post, this will sound like a mix between a brag list and a personal blog, so apologies ahead of time.

Getting the Internship

Since I did a study abroad in Morocco in the fall, I was behind on the internship game. I still didn't have an offer in late April, so I reached out to Vercel and was luckily able to get one after a few rounds of interviews!

I had initially hoped to join the v0 or AI SDK teams, but I ended up on the Next.js/Turbopack team, which turned out to be great (more about that in a bit). Things were last-minute and hectic, but I moved to SF on June 1st. I lived in a hostel in the Tenderloin until I could find an apartment (I eventually found a $1200 private room in Chinatown — unimaginably expensive for Utah, where I'm from, but unimaginably cheap compared to other prices in the area.)

What I Worked On

Things were last minute, but I worked with my manager to choose an intern project. We decided that I would work on adding typed routes support to Next.js.

In the end, I worked on TypeScript support broadly in Next.js. I added automatic route type generation, stabilized typed links + type validation, and brought both to Turbopack. I also deprecated the next lint command, brought Biome support to Next, and worked on some internal projects like a traces viewer for Turbopack.

In addition to these, I built a few projects that I couldn't bring to completion in time, including a 7-chapter tutorial on building your own React framework (which I mentioned in my summer review and hope to publish soon!)

The Experience

I really enjoyed Vercel's culture. We had an AI-focused hackathon with wide participation — I built a chatbot with code execution capabilities using Sandboxes. Generally people aren't super chatty and are fairly "heads-down" grinding on work, but I had some good opportunities to chat with company leadership like Tom Occhino, Malte Ubl, and Guillermo Rauch.

The coolest thing was working with teammates who are insanely talented. I've been doing web dev and using React for over 8 years now, so it felt like meeting your favorite celebrity to chat with and work alongside people who helped build React or other significant parts of the ecosystem!

If you're considering working or interning at Vercel, feel free to reach out with questions! I also made some documents with tips that will be shared with new interns.