Show HN: Gomix the easiest way to build apps and bots | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Gomix the easiest way to build apps and bots

community.gomix.me

185 pointsYahivin45 comments

Hi, I'm the creator and team lead of Gomix (formerly HyperDev). We're relaunching with a new brand and a ton of new features: persistent filesystems, faster start up times, better reliability and performance, and the beginnings of multiple language support.

I'm happy to answer any questions about design, tech, development, deploying Docker on AWS, etc.

How much of WebPutty code is left there or none at all?

None of the WebPutty code made it into Gomix, but the goals of making development more accessible remain :)

Zero, but it's open-source if you want to do something with it: https://github.com/FogCreek/WebPutty/

Can I use golang to develop? ie 'go'mix?

Edit:

>> hese are there to help maintain service levels for all, and to stop someone’s accidental infinite loop somehow costing us a small fortune.

It blows my mind companies allow users to run code in environments that allow this. Containers mitigate it, but from a resource allocation perspective, that's an expensive "solution".

We've got plans to open up the platform to more languages soon, Go is among them.

I really enjoyed hyperdev - thanks!

Just wanted to let you know, the name "gomix" sounds exactly like a derogatory term for homosexuals in Russian. Might want to re-evaluate that name...

That's unfortunately correct, that would be the first thing that would pop into the mind of almost all Russian speakers...

Any name will always mean something bad in some language.

In what languages do names like y combinator or amazon web services or sublime text mean "something bad"?

> ... (formerly HyperDev)

HyperDev sounds about right

They should have already done some due diligence before zeroing in on a name. If they already did, then it means they are ok with it though it might have negative connotations in some demographics.

We looked but nothing like that came up. From what we can gather it sounds like the term, but isn't exact.

And the outrage roleth forth.

I was thinking "Didn't HyperDev do just this exactly? Even the IDE's look alike"

Very cool app

This from the team at FogCreek Software. That alone merits a trial, after Fogbugz, StackOverflow, and Trello. Good luck and keep making good software.

I really love this. Not just the technology but the attitude; it's a demonstration that our workflow can be much simpler, but without cynicism or academic snootiness. Thanks for showing us that the web can be a dev-friendly platform again!

thanks! We really appreciate this

Aside from the tech required to enable a web UI for creating and collaboratively editing full applications and providing the infrastructure to quickly spin up and deploy these apps... a big part of the appeal to me is the design and personality of the site.

The playfulness makes me curious and interested to go build something "just because", rather than start coming up with all the reasons why I would or wouldn't want to use this over my normal workflow. Plus, the starter app prompts "Tell me your hopes and dreams" - something my wife would say, so <heartstrings>.

cool, pleased to hear it! The “tell me your hopes and dreams” bit came from an early user test we did. We literally just took the app they made and turned it into the welcome project.

Just found you guys from the new Joel on Software post [1]:

Congrats on the launch!

Would love to see an infrastructure deep dive post sometime : )

1: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/06/anil-dash-is-the-n...

I'm going to point you in the direction of this https://blog.fogcreek.com/hyperdev-tech-stack/ just in case you came across it yourself. As I wanted to make clear that it's now out of date. While a lot of the front-end bits are still true, we've re-done the backend from scratch, so it definitely needs an update.

Here's a quick shallow dive:

AWS: EC2, Route53, CloudFormation, CloudFront, S3

Docker Swarm, Node.js, CoffeeScript, Go

We'll probably do an updated post at some point detailing more of the architectural decisions.

I forgot to add bash, a surprising amount of bash!

This could be a great complement to stack overflow - with real running examples rather than just code snippets.

Like a fiddle on steroids, yeah.

You've probably heard this a couple of times, but - I don't have a GitHub account, don't want a github account, yet for me to use this I have to create a github account.

Any reason for this?

We plan to broaden our auth options soon, though you can get almost the full experience anonymously without even logging in.

This was my exact thought, when i tried to sign up. I'm curious about this service but not enough to sign up to github to access this service.

Love it as a lightweight way to test out new frameworks and boilerplates. This would be particularly useful for kitchen sink demo apps. The potential as a teaching platform is enormous-- imagine getting to learn React for the first time without spending time on the tooling and boilerplate first.

This looks like a neat service. Browsing through it it was hard to get a sense, what exactly is the use case other than a digital playground. Is this meant to be used for something production-level or just fun a tool to play/explore/experiment with?

We're currently in beta right now but long term we expect to provide a production grade service on par with AWS, Heroku, and DigitalOcean (complete with paid plans).

This bears explanation.

The free-tier, that is the only one available now, allows you to develop all sort of applications already: you can hook up a database through an external provider or through SQLite, you have a few megabytes (128MB) of storage and you can customise your application as you want (using JavaScript and compiled-to-JavaScript languages for now, but more are coming!).

Larger applications require more "benefits", just to name a few: more disk space, a dedicated database, more cpu/ram, a less aggressive cleanup when not used (we put your app to sleep if it has not been used for 5/10 minutes).

Of course additional features are needed. We provide what you see now for free, and we will charge for some of the features that are coming. We expect to cover pretty much any requirement that a developer can have when developing a web application.

This is a big bet, but... well, if it wasn't, it weren't worth to play :)

I'd like to use something like this for making and iterating user-testable prototypes with team members who might not know how to use version control, text editors, IDE's, etc. I work with smart entrepreneurs and designers who can can do some technical stuff, but shouldn't need to spend their time googling installation instructions and git commands.

Why the name change from HyperDev to GoMix? Any meaning behind the new one?

The new name's intended to be a little friendlier for people who might not necessarily see themselves as "devs" but still want to make stuff.

any inspiration from hypercard for the original name?

we were definitely inspired by hypercard and the work of Bill Atkinson

(I'm the Designer of Gomix)

I'm helping a lot of people remotely, doing code review and helping get better at programming (mostly helping more junior people). The github import + shared editor feature looks like it would be SUPER useful for me to quickly import their github project and start making comment, changing some code with them etc..

Will definitely look into that!

This is really cool. Not sure how much I would use the IDE, but it seems like a really nicely indexed collections of solved problems with example code.

This looks like a good tool for remote coding interviews.

No IRC, no me :( sadly we can't use any of these technologies at work so I'm stuck with old fashioned IRC for team communication

You should take a look at https://www.npmjs.com/package/irc which makes it easy to send, listen and receive on IRC connections in a Node app. Which of course you can include in a Gomix app :)

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