Universal Now: Now, on Every Cloud
zeit.co
zeit.co
[1]: https://medium.com/@tjholowaychuk/blueprints-for-up-1-5f8197... [2]: https://github.com/apex/up
The entire premise of Zeit is something that I explained to him five years ago in a taxi ride. I was in active communication with Guillermo about developing the idea up until two years ago when he went silent for a month or two and I then I read the announcement for Zeit on Hacker News.
I'm sure he'll sell Zeit to the first high-bidder and completely throw the development team under the bus ( like he did to TJ at his last startup ).
If you don't believe me, you can just look at the Github activity for the Zeit organization. [name redacted] has copy and pastied the same Now project into new projects several times ( which deletes the commit logs of several contributors giving him sole Git credit for the projects ).
[1] - https://www.google.com/amp/s/venturebeat.com/2011/08/10/node...
[2] - https://www.google.com/amp/s/readwrite.com/2011/12/01/first-...
I'll say this as a more general comment on this sort of thing: I work more within the realm of academia, and of course in that realm there is a very strong requirement and culture of citing all sources, influences etc. In that context, this issue might not appear, or not as much. Giving credit as a tertiary contributor is both easy and "free". That's harder in the startup world because boundaries if activties are more blurred, and giving any sort of formal recognition of influence or minor collaboration can cost a lot in terms of equity etc. At least, that's my impression, from the academia end of things.
Visions of Apple crying foul about Microsoft sealing from Xerox.
I won't be going into details here on HN because it's a somewhat pointless waste of time. There are valid reasons why TJ and I are upset with rauchg. I've said my piece.
Just an opinion as someone who doesn't care yet about who stole whose lollipop.
There is a big difference between emulating or being inspired by another's idea versus actively collaborating with them and then simply stop working with them once you feel you don't need them anymore.
Without people like TJ and myself, Zeit wouldn't exist. Buyer beware to whoever decides to acquire Zeit.
While I don't want to sound condescending or like a promoter of fad philosophies, I've found that meditation and reading Stoic philosophy and really helps to build a thicker skin.
You sound as if resentment / envy is deeply poisoning you, and yet in the scope of business schemes it is really nothing.
Also, based upon your attitude here, it's not surprising that collaboration ended. Most people are insecure and envious, but you can't found companies with people like that as they will kill the company.
Care to share more?
As I said on Twitter, it's a CLI, literally anyone can build this. Startups have their place but in this case it's such a cowardly way to run a business.
Funny thing is it doesn't even follow best practices, they clearly don't have much experience in the space, which is evident in that they built almost nothing in two years, this is basically a hobby project.
I can't compete with free though, so congrats, best of luck with your joke of a "company".
Do you mind elaborating on this?
Sure they can have an audit trail of events, but Terraform/CloudFormation are industry standard now, as changes can be easily previewed and reviewed by peers.
Single-command deploys are cute, don't get me wrong, but it's ultimately a gimmick. It's great for solo or small teams, but for larger teams, they'll ALWAYS use CI, and they'll ALWAYS want to restrict damage that a single team member can do to the infrastructure.
There's nothing novel about single-command deploys. Hell at Segment we had "/deploy blog" in Slack for the simple cases that we weren't worried about, tons of companies do this stuff. Most at very least have git -> CI deploys which is a more correct way to do things for real teams.
Why the automatic assumption this idea was "stolen"?
Sorry if my ranting comes off as immature, you're probably not wrong haha but I'm perfectly happy to discuss about how ridiculous Silicon Valley is, founders aren't special, they're not visionaries, just con artists.
I'm not saying life is supposed to be fair, startups are designed to keep people like me from competing, it's just a huge joke to me.
Seems like you're arguing that VC are funding something worthless or not worth much... but that you should be getting paid for building the same product?
I'm a nobody in this field but know enough about you to get that you're extremely productive and talented. Why not go this route:
Plenty of so called "lifestyle" businesses that make plenty of money. Of course it's not that easy, but find a niche and build a great product. Pure tech plays like cloud deployment infrastructure seems to be operating at such a hyper-competitive level, that there's no way to avoid either big VC money, or Google/Amazon themselves.
Hell there's even a timeseries startup, been around for ~5 years, they had no clue how to write databases, got paid for 3 years to finally realize columnar makes sense for analytics... no offence to them but you see this all the time, re-loaders with some vague trivial "vision", bunch of clueless VCs and buzzwords, and boom they have millions. It's such a sad way to compete, at least have the skills first. It's like no one wants to actually earn things these days.
Also, picking an original idea is skill.
If the idea is not original or unusually compelling, then marketing is even more important.
There's more to business than code. Happy to offer some tips on competitive strategy and moat building if you'd like, altho I'm just an hobbyist investor with an econ degree from a former life.
True. However, in the case of Google Cloud Platform, the Protocol Buffer definitions for their services have been open-sourced here: https://github.com/googleapis/googleapis
There are two immediate benefits/possibilities: you can generate your own gRPC client libraries for GCP services and you can re-implement GCP services using their open-sourced interface definition. One example would be the Google Cloud Functions Emulator [1], which implements the service defined in the Cloud Functions service' Protocol Buffer [2]. You could deploy that Emulator somewhere for a sort-of "dev" version of the production Cloud Functions service, and the Gcloud SDK could talk to it.
[1]: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/cloud-functions-emula... [2]: https://github.com/googleapis/googleapis/blob/master/google/...
So far I'm seeing this as useful for side projects at most. The layer isn't opaque enough where I can troubleshoot serious issues and its too new to know there won't be any. More layers add more complexity in the early stages, over time though this could get quite compelling.
But it is a really cool thing.
It's difficult to create something that works universally since the APIs can be radically different. Terraform is a nice attempt to plug in different hosting solutions and configuration layers (puppet, anisble, chef), but your configuration still varies pretty heavily per provider and I've often struggled with it enough that I gave up and just wrote scripts to call my providers API directly.
I'm looking forward to this.
(Waiting for all the comments saying I shouldn't have that trust in t-minus...)
We just wanted to make "now" the go to tool for cloud deployments.
We've a backend for "now" and that's the pricing we've mentioned on our page. Just like that, we've providers for AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and etc.
We'll sure make "ZEIT now cloud backend" better everyday. But sometimes, we just wanna deploy to existing clouds. That's what this is about.
If you decide to deploy to AWS, you don't need to pay nothing for ZEIT.
You can also think like, this is we challenging ourself :)
It looks promising, but it's unclear how to use it for a real app. Perhaps the idea is you maintain a separate set of servers which talk to your db?
Edit: Autocorrect fix
Other cloud providers are completely separate.