Delba de Oliveira

There is a version of Delba de Oliveira who became a doctor. She studied medicine. She had a plan. Then a colleague at her job asked her to open a GitHub issue, and everything changed - because she had no idea what that meant, and the curiosity that question lit was impossible to extinguish. That is the whole origin story. One small request. One internet rabbit hole. And the rest, as millions of Next.js developers now know, is documentation history.

Today, Delba is a Staff Developer Advocate and DX Engineer at Vercel, the company behind Next.js. She did not just join the team and write some explainer posts. She built the Next.js Learn platform, the official interactive learning path that has guided countless developers through React fundamentals and the App Router. She created the React Foundations course. She rewrote, redesigned, and maintained the Next.js documentation during one of the framework's biggest transformations - the shift to server components and the App Router in Next.js 13 and beyond.

Before landing at Vercel, Delba moved through a set of roles that look, on the surface, nothing like a tech career: Customer Service and Fraud Analysis at Mastercard, Recruitment Consultant at Adecco, coordinator at Lambda School's EU program. What connects them is a pattern of organizing, communicating, and building systems that help people. That skill set - understanding how people learn, what confuses them, and what clicks - turned out to be exactly what the Next.js ecosystem needed as it scaled into the most talked-about React framework on the web.

Delba is not the kind of developer advocate who shows up at conferences and demos the happy path. She cares, pointedly, about the design and decisions behind web experiences. She built a custom Remotion framework - Remotion being a code-first video production library - so she could generate visual explainer videos about concepts like use client and Partial Pre-rendering programmatically, rather than recording and re-recording screen captures. She built a terminal-based AI learning course as an experiment in alternative educational interfaces. She is a hobbyist videographer who applies production thinking to technical content. The craft shows in every piece she produces.

In October 2024, she co-presented the opening keynote at Next.js Conf alongside Guillermo Rauch and Lee Robinson - a recognition of just how central she has become to the framework's story and its community. She keynoted React Summit 2022 on routing in React 18. She has spoken at Prisma Day, GraphCMS, Hygraph, and multiple editions of Next.js Conf. She appeared on the PodRocket podcast to dissect Partial Pre-rendering - one of the more technically nuanced new features in recent Next.js history - and made it sound manageable.

In 2025, she is experimenting with React's ViewTransition API for cross-page animations, a sign that she keeps running toward whatever is newest and most misunderstood in the ecosystem. She is a Raycast power user - the kind of person who optimizes their own tooling until it disappears into muscle memory. Her personal website, delba.dev, is built with Next.js, React, TypeScript, and Tailwind, which is less a technical choice and more a personal statement: she builds the thing she teaches. She lives in it.

What makes Delba unusual is the combination: she can read a technical RFC and understand its implications, and she can also explain those implications to someone who learned React last week. Most people pick one lane. She drives both at once, and she makes it look effortless - which is the most sure sign that it is not.