At Flovatar [1] we've been using SVG and SMIL animations as a way to achieve true composability and interactivity for our NFTs while also being able to store all the illustrations fully on-chain.
I just fell in love with SVG and highly encourage everyone to dig more into the potentials of it. You can even have fun and create epic pranks [2] with it :)
I recently became a web3 developer and created Flovatar (flovatar.com) and I totally agree with all the issues outlined in this article, but I think they are mostly limited to the Ethereum ecosystem and because most projects are not thinking outside the box and using IPFS to store the images.
In my case I decided to build it on the Flow blockchain (flow.com) and to use SVG illustrations and I couldn’t be happier about both choices.
Flow provides a JS library to interact with the blockchain without the need to use browser plugins like Metamask and also allows to store data on-chain with really affordable costs.
Having the SVG stored in the NFT guarantees that all the issues outlined in the article won’t apply in my case and will be guaranteed to exist as long as the blockchain will live (unlike IPFS where someone actually has to keep paying for the servers to store the images).
I could go on by saying that I managed to build a Marketplace that handles 500k$/month transactions with a single and relatively simple smart contract. Doing that in a web2 way would have been much much harder to both implement and maintain.
So from my perspective all the problems outlined in the article are super valid, but if you look a bit outside the current “standards” of the Ethereum world there is definitely hope and lots of solutions available.
I turned 42 recently and I went through a similar situation.
Good job, well paid and still interesting enough, but becoming more and more boring every month.
At some point I felt that I had just two options on my table:
- Stay in the company as technical director to continue growing but with limited expansion possibilities. Write less code and make more boring meetings basically.
- Continue doing more coding as senior developer and be happier with my life without all the meetings, but that would mean even more limited growth possibilities.
So like in most things in life, in the end I found out that there are not just 2 options, but thousands.
In my case the best solution I found was keep working with my daily job to have the stability that makes me feel "safe" when I go to sleep, and at the same time spend most of my free time in doing what I like the most: coding on some project that is 100% mine and where I have total control over.
I tried this approach a few times with some SaaS projects and even if they didn't became unicorns and some generated barely 30-50k$/year, they were totally worth the effort in creating them, because on top of the money, the most valuable thing you get in return is to learn how to create a project from start to finish, with all the non-technical components like marketing included.
Over time I found out that you'll need to be lucky enough to find someone good enough like you on the design and marketing side of it as well, but if you finally find the right team, then it will become 100x better than working on any company. Both financially and in terms of happiness.
Of course it's not a recipe that will work for everyone because you really need to be passionate about something to spend most of your free time on it, and you will risk of getting burned out, but from my experience is definitely worth the effort!
And the most important part of this, is that you will have the ability to jump into any technology you want!
In my case I felt like the web2.0 was getting pretty boring and repetitive for me after doing all the SaaS projects, but now I'm about to launch a web3 project that I built within 5-6 months without any prior knowledge of smart contract in any way.
You can't find a job that will give you the opportunity to make such drastic changes in your career and will allow you that level of freedom.
These are exactly the pain points that Taylor Otwell (creator of Laravel, a PHP framework) tried to solve with Spark (https://spark.laravel.com/).
It was actually just updated to v6.0 yesterday so it's definitely a good time for considering it.
I personally used it for a couple of projects and I'm really happy about it. It probably saved me a few weeks or a couple of months of tedious work!
I've been using PHP for many years now and I was very close to switch to NodeJS or Go a couple years ago until I discovered Laravel. That changed my view of PHP completely and it improved my code quality and potential by a 10x factor at least.
I think that what Taylor Otwell has done in the last years with Laravel and with its ecosystem has been really underestimated. Not just for Laravel that is an excellent framework in my opinion, but especially with all the other products and libraries that he built along the way.
It covers all the needs I had in building my last few SaaS products and it made my life soooo much easier.
A few examples:
Forge and Envoyer: setup and manage your VPS in a breeze and deploy your code with zero downtime.
Spark: create a SaaS product in literally a matter of minutes without having to care about all the boilerplates
Echo: real time notification across multiple channels (mail, Pusher, Slack, etc.)
Passport: OAuth2 API server as easy as it can be
Scout: Redis/Algolia search with just a couple of lines of code
Dusk: test your app easily both for unit and browser testing
Cashier: payments with Stripe and Braintree in a breeze (both for one time payment and recurring ones)
Socialite: OAuth for all kind of services (Facebook, Twitter, Google, ...)
And beside all this, there is the excellent Laracasts by Jeffrey Way that made me learn not just Laravel but PHP and JS in general in a really great way.
And I could go on talking with the great and simple queueing system, the perfect integration with VueJS that I love as well, ...
As you can see I'm a big big fan of Laravel in general and I hope that it will become popular in HN especially over time.
The guy from "Pair" in the first episode of "Planet of the Apps" [https://www.planetoftheapps.com/en-us] tried to make a similar SDK his main business model but eventually failed to get the fundings from the VC.
I hope in the end he decided to stick his focus on the app (which is quite amazing), otherwise he's in big trouble now!
I really think that a lot of new apps will come out in this space, now that the technology is much more approachable.
The 21st of March one my server stopped working without any apparent reason, and it could no longer reach the DNS server to lookup domains, so all the API calls made by my app started failing.
After excluding networking issues (pinging from console was working fine), and after a lot of digging I found out that the source of the error was actually a security patch just released by Canonical that caused NSS ABI to break after a few hours of running. This would result in being unable to reach any external domain, and the only solution would be to restart the server.
Thankfully they just released a patch of the patch so hopefully everything should be fine now.
I just find it amazing how something like that could have happened and how installing critical and recommended patches now has become something more like a roulette than a sense of relief.
What about using Forge instead (http://forge.laravel.com)? I know it's not free but for 10$/month you can get Let's Encrypt cert in 20 seconds and tons of more features (server provisioning with really good security setup and all the tools you need).
What I think most people are missing about PHP is the incredible ecosystem that emerged in the recent years (especially with Laravel) that helped to speed up the development of web apps by A LOT and removed all the annoying boilerplate.
I know that nowadays there are a lot of fancier languages to write your next project, but I challenge anyone to find anyone that has a similar ecosystem that can do all the following things with just a matter of editing config files basically.
- Create a fully working app with authentication, database migrations, security checks, middlewares, route management, and much more with just one command line ("laravel new project_name") (Laravel)
- Logging in a user with an external service with one line of code. (Laravel Socialite)
- Sending real time notification with any type of channel. (email, socketio, sms, ios/android, ...) (Laravel Echo)
- Create a complete Oauth2 server with all the backend and frontend parts with just one configuration file. (Laravel Passport)
- Make text search with Elasticsearch using external services as easy as making a normal query to the local DB. (Laravel Scout)
- Super easy tu use payment system integration that handles both one time payments and subscriptions with Stipe and Braintree. (Laravel Cashier)
- Optimized and lightweight version of the full framework to get blazing fast APIs. (Laravel Lumen)
- Local web server that automatically creates .dev domains for each project and that works with most PHP projects (not just Laravel) (Laravel Valet)
- Vagrant box with everything you need for a local development web server. (Laravel Homestead)
- Easy frontend assets management (compiling, versioning, ...) built on top of Gulp and Webpack. (Laravel Elixir)
- Provision a web server with all the things you need (security, git push-to-deploy, ssl certificates, queue workers, ...) properly set up with one simple click. (Laravel Forge^)
- Zero downtime deployment with history backup and much more. (Laravel Envoyer^)
- Fully working SaaS app that handles all the boring stuff (subscriptions, invoicing, team management, emails, ...) and let you concentrate on the actually product you want to built. (Laravel Spark^)
- Tons of video tutorials/screencasts/lessons on how to use every aspect of Laravel and much more (PHP, Vuejs, Text editors, ...) (Laracasts)
As you can see from the list, almost everything is related to the incredibly good framework Laravel, that I highly recommend to anyone that is working or will work with PHP.
I especially recommend to all those people that are about to create their next SaaS project to take a look at Laravel Spark. It really puts all the pieces of the puzzle together and it makes your MVP really around the corner instead of months away.
Coming from old-school PHP where I hacked everything together, after learning and switching to Laravel my life as a developer completely changed and now I can't imagine that I'm still using the same language actually.
They feel like two completely different things and in my opinion all those people that are talking bad about PHP, they are stuck with old memories of how PHP used to be. Yes, PHP as a language still has a lot of things that needs improving, but PHP as ecosystem of libraries and frameworks is definitely still the king of the web!
The King is dead, long live the King! :)
[^]: These are commercial products but their price is definitely accessible (99$ for Spark and 10$/month for Forge and Envoyer)
I came across Vue through Laravel and I think they are definitely the best frameworks for their own language (JS and PHP). And the best part is that with the latest versions (2.0 and 5.3) they are working really nice together. Almost as if they were part of the same ecosystem.
It's incredible how easy it has become to make a new web app that has everything you need (registration, authentication, api, JWT, notifications,...) with just one command line (laravel new project). It's a huge jumpstart that allows you to focus on what's really important and forget about all the annoying boilerplate.
And since Vue.js is so well integrated with Laravel, you get all the benefits of the back-end also on the front-end. With all the authentication and API with JWT (and much more) ready to go, it becomes also a great way for newcomers to learn using Vue and play around with it.
I recently used Laravel Spark [ https://spark.laravel.com/ ] to manage all the subscriptions and I really love it!
Before I had to do it all by myself and it was a nightmare and so much time taken away to develop the real app.
I highly recomment it for any SaaS product. It gives you a huge jumpstart and you can concentrate on developing just your app.
Btw, it supports both Stripe and Braintree.
my idea is to use little icons (now really terrible looking) with numbers and playing with opacity to give an idea of the strength for each square of the board.
I still have some problems in some cases displaying incorrect numbers, but I hope to fix that as soon as I have some spare time :)
We chose Spreedly for our startup and it was really easy to integrate. I like the idea of having the customer's credit cards details saved independently from the Payment Gateway and Merchant account, so that you're free to switch any time you want if you find a better deal in just 5 minutes via the control panel.
Beside this though we found 2 main problems along the path:
1) Setting up a merchant account for multi currency (we charge in USD and get paid in EUR) is a nightmare and it takes a lot of time (in the end it took more than 3 months!). Things get much more complicated and costs can rise quickly. Also, you have to register with American Express separately and you have to do it for 2 separate accounts (one for euros and one for dollars).
So you end up with lots of different accounts (one for Spreedly, one for the payment gateway, one for the Visa+Mastercard merchant account, one for American Express) and this makes things much more complicated to manage.
2) Spreedly decided in the last months to focus just on the Spreedly Core (vaulting the credit card data in a secure place) and sold the subscription part to Pin Payments
http://blog.spreedly.com/2013/07/15/pin-payments-purchases-s...
So this means that the developing of new features was dropped and their minimal control panel stayed the same over the last couple of years. Not sure if this is going to change in the future with Pin Payments, but it's always a big question mark for the future. Support and maintenance is still covered, but I wouldn't expect any new stuff for the future...
So I guess that in the end if I were in your place I would stick with Braintree or Paymill, and we would probably have chosen Braintree if at that time they would have offered the payment gateway and merchant account as well (they started only since last year I think).
I'm looking forward to see Stripe coming in Europe and hopefully cover all the states very soon.
What about the API? Is it still going to be supported in the new Basecamp or will it remain just for the classic Basecamp? I really hope there will be some kind of continuity where the data structure make it possible.
Beside this, it looks really clean and fast. I like it! :)
https://css-tricks.com/guide-svg-animations-smil/
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/SVG_animati...
At Flovatar [1] we've been using SVG and SMIL animations as a way to achieve true composability and interactivity for our NFTs while also being able to store all the illustrations fully on-chain.
I just fell in love with SVG and highly encourage everyone to dig more into the potentials of it. You can even have fun and create epic pranks [2] with it :)
[1] https://flovatar.com
[2] https://twitter.com/flovatar/status/1520509399466483716