At first I was like this interesting but I don't see this as more than a hobby project. Then I did some more reading and it turns out they recently raised 5.5M (seed round). I guess if they can become the next place for people to dump code for ML, I can see how they were able to raise.
I don’t know. These things make for very impressive demos and can raise a lot of interest, but the devil is always in the details.
I’ve worked on a project like that before. Very simple editor, you put your code in, and it gives you an API endpoint. Wanna make a change? Just edit, hit save and it’s live. It was a great hit in all demos. Everybody loved it. Then developers actually started using it, and questions like “how do I do dependency management?”, “How do I split my code into multiple files?”, “How do I build my code?”, “What about Java/C#/Go/Python/etc?”, “How do I debug my code?”, “How do I use source control?”, “How do I integrate it into my CI/CD?”, “Can I deploy a container?”, “How do I manage multiple contributors and projects and access and dev/stage/prod?” Come up.
You can see how they skirt around some of these questions. “Modern JavaScript” as in just import from npm or urls so they don’t have to worry about dependency management and putting lots of code in 1 file. Or writing a custom blob library to deal with storage. But the minute you need anything that needs a standard file system, network features, or anything any developer would expect to have, you run into a very steep cliff. You end up slowly needing to implement an IDE, a source control, a CI/CD system, a deployment pipeline, an offline experience, a monitoring story, and many things that are better implemented by many other products already.
sdesol|1 year ago
eddythompson80|1 year ago
I’ve worked on a project like that before. Very simple editor, you put your code in, and it gives you an API endpoint. Wanna make a change? Just edit, hit save and it’s live. It was a great hit in all demos. Everybody loved it. Then developers actually started using it, and questions like “how do I do dependency management?”, “How do I split my code into multiple files?”, “How do I build my code?”, “What about Java/C#/Go/Python/etc?”, “How do I debug my code?”, “How do I use source control?”, “How do I integrate it into my CI/CD?”, “Can I deploy a container?”, “How do I manage multiple contributors and projects and access and dev/stage/prod?” Come up.
You can see how they skirt around some of these questions. “Modern JavaScript” as in just import from npm or urls so they don’t have to worry about dependency management and putting lots of code in 1 file. Or writing a custom blob library to deal with storage. But the minute you need anything that needs a standard file system, network features, or anything any developer would expect to have, you run into a very steep cliff. You end up slowly needing to implement an IDE, a source control, a CI/CD system, a deployment pipeline, an offline experience, a monitoring story, and many things that are better implemented by many other products already.
RamblingCTO|1 year ago