I’m posting today to introduce Groovestack: PostgreSQL, Ruby on Rails, GraphQL and React-admin for fullstack application development (especially back-office platforms and dashboard applications).
Our team has been leveraging this stack successfully for multiple projects and have found this combination to be robust, feature-rich, scalable and cost-effective. It’s an opinionated, fullstack framework that eschews the ‘bring-any-database’ and ‘bring-any-API’ Rails philosophy for specific choices that are an ideal fit for many applications.
We’ve used this stack to build a variety of back-office and end-user applications. We’ve found development accelerates as common patterns become recognized by the team - easing integration and generating more code reuse. Groovestack allows for leaner modules by reducing requirements to a smaller set of configurations.
We are posting here to find teams that are already using this stack and those that are interested in how it might benefit their projects.
By giving this stack a name, we hope to make it easier to aggregate the community and accelerate the development of new Groovestack-compatible modules. #groovestack
We’ve put together an introduction that describes the rationale for choosing these components as well as some new community resources that we are organizing.
To demonstrate how these pieces fit together, we’ve launched a Groovestack Demo that incorporates our CORE Jobs module which provides a full API and administrative UI for background jobs in Rails. There is a link to the demo from the Groovestack page.
You can switch to esbuild now or you can switch later, but you will switch. It is superior in design, configuration and performance by orders of magnitude.
Every company doing hard tech should be considering federal funding for early stage R&D. The US gov't has been consistently providing more early stage capital than VC for several decades through the SBIR program. (About $2.5B each year). Capital through the program is NON-DILUTIVE, Phase 1 grants can be $225K, Phase 2 grants to $1.5MM, and you likely have government and private sector customers at the end of Phase 2.
Steve Blank's Innovation Corp initiative is now working with the NIH, NSF and Defense to help companies development product-market-fit once basic funding has been achieved as well.
Disclaimer: My company GrantIQ.com helps companies find federal funding opportunities & helps large companies identify breakthrough technologies being developed through these programs.
Reminder to self: If a telcom company is involved, a customer pricing bait-and-switch is never very far away.
Expounding a bit further, the pricing they are proposing measures usage in 'millions of messages'. Nothing like an arbitrary large metric to confuse consumers about their actual potential usage. How many 'signalling messages' did you use last month fellow consumer?
Sam Altman has recently expressed interest in seeing more 'high-tech' submissions to YC http://blog.samaltman.com/new-rfs-breakthrough-technologies. I agree that defining 'high-tech' vs 'tech' is a bit ambiguous and fraught with potential disagreement, however for the purposes here, we are talking about companies that engage in some type of basic R&D in pursuit of the core product development.
'Science' is a grouping used to categorize funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) - cross-functional, but a good enough bucket for the purposes of the key used.
Take a look at the video/demo of the Snapper toolset built on top of btrfs. Might give you a better feel for maturity level and the tooling that it enables: http://snapper.io/
It's hardly too late. If you just look at the use case of application logging for example, the latest fashion is logging using JSON format log files, which is INSANE for a different set of reasons. I have servers that generate TB of log files on a regular basis. ASCII delimited log file format standard could be adopted by the application logging space, could result in some uniform tools that provide better streaming support for log shipping, and gain adoption in other adjacent use cases from there.
No kudos for picking the worst language around to run on hardware which may have mission critical requirements. When a device sensor heart rate stops reporting data, will your JS code return undefined, null, NaN, 0 or something else? Who needs mature error handling? Low memory requirements? No problem, v8 will have a reasonable memory footprint by 2024.
Dart is better than Javascript, but primarily because any real language is better than Javascript. However let's jump ahead 2 years:
- Browsers will support pluggable scripting languages so the developer will be able to choose Javascript, Dart (native), Ruby, Python or Go as the language they use to code in the browser. Why? Because it's the only way to break the innovation stasis in client-side web coding. As an aside, Microsoft got this right in very early versions of IE when you could script in JS or VBScript for example.
- A new Open Source IDE will become defacto. it will embed Chromium and Webkit and will feel more like a traditional IDE that a text editor with IDE features, or a browser with a console window. The Browser was never designed as an IDE, yet it is becoming one, organically, and accidentally. Ironic since there are very capable sophisticated IDEs out there that can accelerate web app coding. Dart gets this right. Coding in browser is not going to cut it. You need a sophisticated tool designed explicitly for this purpose to build bigger, more complex, performant applications.
I've prototyped some with Dart and my personal opinion is:
- better than Javascript, but
- it's evolved from JS which I feel is a critical flaw
- native IDE is smart, requisite for future web development
- core libraries and language are changing too rapidly to use in any 'conservative' production application
Let's skip the stopgap measures and get a browser that supports Ruby or Go natively, then revisit this whole question.
I think your general reaction is correct. The successful sites for freelancers are engaged in a race to the bottom since they are open to and often overwhelmed with offshore developers.
There is plenty of opportunity for new sites to solve this problem in various ways. Specialized skill sets, the ability to do onsite work, training+coding, all provide angles that I believe could be effective, potentially each as the basis for standalone services.
I've contemplated the idea of a marketing site to promote a very specific service:
- 2 Days Onsite: 1 Day Training, 1 Day Hacking with Your Team
- 3 Topics to choose from:
* High Performance Rails,
* Customized ElasticSearch, OR
* Ember.JS-enable your App
No offshore firm could provide this service, and few freelancers tout their most specialized skills effectively.