In Q1 2026, I closed a 30% compensation increase to join Vercel’s framework team as a senior engineer — 14 months after picking up Next.js 15’s release candidate, and 6 months after shipping my first production Next.js 15 app that cut our team’s infrastructure bill by $22k/month. This is the unvarnished retrospective: no hype, just benchmarked code, real-world metrics, and the exact steps that moved the needle. 🔴 Live Ecosystem Stats ⭐ vercel/next.js — 139,247 stars, 30,993 forks 📦 next — 158,013,417 downloads last month ⭐ vercel/vercel — 15,403 stars, 3,550 forks Data pulled live from GitHub and npm. 📡 Hacker News Top Stories Right Now Why does it take so long to release black fan versions?…