5 Questions with ZEIT’s Leo Lamprecht
1. How did you find programming?
At the age of 12, about 7 years ago, I switched schools and joined a new class.
I made new friends who were building a homepage that contained information for our classmates (mostly pictures and important dates).
Back then, they were using a basic drag-and-drop homepage builder.
After some time, they got bored and abandoned the site. I, however, found joy in discovering what’s behind the curtains and continued with building my own site on that platform.
Later on, I taught myself everything required for writing such sites completely on my own from start to finish. Then, over time, I dug deeper and deeper into this topic, founded several projects (including a web hosting platform [pictured]) and am now pushing ZEIT to new levels.
2. What attracted you to ZEIT? What was your background, and how did ZEIT fit into your personal goals as a developer?
Somewhere between 2015 and 2016, I decided to end my apprenticeship and become self-employed. At that point of time, I had already been working with several people across the whole globe — personally and over my old team Cutting Egg.
I only had very few projects that I knew I could take on, but I knew that I wanted something new. I wanted to be independent, make my own decisions and also have time to push my own ideas forward.
Thankfully, more and more people got interested in me over time, gave me work and allowed me to earn my daily bread with programming. However, there was one thing that bugged me a lot: I didn’t have a team who I could share my experiences and achievements with.
That was the time when I coincidentally got to know Guillermo and his work over Twitter. As I scrolled through his tweets, I came across a special one: It only included an image of a triangle, the word “soon” and a link to zeit.co.
I later found out that he was in the process of founding a company and looking for people to join him on his mission.
Since I wasn’t just looking for a team, but also a position in which I had more responsibilities, resources and a well-suited mentor (Guillermo), I decided to write him, got asked to build a few projects and eventually joined ZEIT full-time.
There are lots of great projects coming out of ZEIT. The Now CLI and Next.js are making big waves. ZEIT’s mission centers around developer UX for cloud computing. How do the electron projects fit into that picture?
Interacting with the cloud has gotten much easier since we first got introduced to it.
However, major improvements mostly took place on the front of this whole picture: While users got to enjoy the convenience of being able to access their files from anywhere and take advantage of various new services, developers were stuck with too complicated and half-baked workflows.
Since ZEIT is around, you only need to run a single command (Now CLI) or drag a directory on a tray menu icon (Now Desktop) to make your project accessible from the web. Literally anyone who’s comfortable with using a computer can do at least one of these two things.
And that’s exactly where our Electron apps fit in perfectly:
- Now Desktop provides a GUI for deploying your projects using drag-and-drop and provides an overview on what your team is doing.
- Hyper is a hackable terminal built on web technologies and acts as the most efficient way to instruct your device and the Now platform.
As you can see, both of them are contributing a lot to making the cloud more accessible — which is ZEIT’s mission.
If you — as a reader — are interested in understanding how I’m building Electron applications, I suggest reading this essay.
What’s the big connecting thread between the products you work on? Is there a general guiding principle at ZEIT that keeps everybody focused?
I’m basically working on everything that’s customer-facing.
Since we’re still a pretty small team, I’m sometimes also working on hidden stuff related to our platform. But when I joined ZEIT, my premise was that my work would be visible from the outside. This allows people to see behind the curtains (just like I did when I started programming), understand why things are like they are and even contribute to our products.
We have many unwritten laws in place at ZEIT, but all in all, I’d say that what we’re doing is mainly driven by our passion and love for the topic.
ZEIT has made some significant OSS contributions lately. What has the impact been on the team and the company? How do your OSS endeavors bring value to the company, the customers, and the developers at ZEIT?
After the release of our first product (Now), we quickly decided to open source Now CLI in order to allow people to work on our product with us and build more trust based on the transparency.
Since then, the number of projects on our GitHub organization grew heavily. Today we’re counting nearly 60,000 stars, 47 public repositories and hundreds of people who have fixed bugs, added features and helped extend our community.
All of the projects we publish not only make us — as a company — more transparent to the outside, but they also bring us closer to the expectations of our customers by enabling them to work directly on the code.
As a result, they and the company are both profiting from a much faster iteration speed on all of our products and the ability to move quicker (because features and bug fixes are landing faster). Together, we’re much more powerful!
Next Steps
- Follow Leo on Twitter.
- Check out ZEIT’s intuitive developer tools at ZEIT.co.
Eric Elliott is the author of “Programming JavaScript Applications” (O’Reilly), and cofounder of DevAnywhere.io. He has contributed to software experiences for Adobe Systems, Zumba Fitness, The Wall Street Journal, ESPN, BBC, and top recording artists including Usher, Frank Ocean, Metallica, and many more.
He works anywhere he wants with the most beautiful woman in the world.
