Using your phone as a software development platform | Hacker News Reader

Using your phone as a software development platform

aista.com

56 pointspolterguy100151 comments

I used to code NodeJS services on my phone quite a lot when I was commuting to an office. I used Termux - https://termux.dev/en/. It was brilliant, and worked far better than you'd think it would. The main problem was the keyboard because the stock Android one doesn't support a lot of symbols. I solved that with https://github.com/klausw/hackerskeyboard.

Folding Bluetooth keyboard, and a phone stand, turn a phone into a pretty decent terminal.

I used to use the Logitech K480 for this, which is a non-folding Bluetooth keyboard with integrated phone stand. Though it was as bulky as carrying a small tablet or laptop would've been, it was still convenient - at the time my only laptop was a 17" tank.

At that point you need a table, right? And you have essentially just reinvented the laptop.

Basically unlike a laptop you don't need a bag, as the keyboard can fit in a pocket. Yes you need a table but the small folding tables trains etc are sufficient.

Few months ago I took that one step further, I forgot my notebook at home, but realised I could just plug in my phone to the monitor (I have Samsung, and their Dex desktop think worked with our usb-c monitors) so I opened tmux and carried on with work :)

Another keyboard for this use case is Unexpected Keyboard [1]. I opted for this one, because Hacker's Keyboard seems to be in maintenance mode (sure, not necessarily an issue, but see the warning in the readme [2]).

[1] https://github.com/Julow/Unexpected-Keyboard

[2] https://github.com/klausw/hackerskeyboard#overview

I’m seriously confused about Aista. After https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32618797 a couple of days ago which is an absurd and utterly groundless criticism of GraphQL (and there seems to be a follow-up post now which I find even more baffling), one user there suggested the whole thing was trolling, and looking through a handful of other articles on that site I became more inclined to accept that the whole was a parody because so many of them are so extreme to the point of absurdity and caricature, and that the product almost epitomises some of the sorts of problems the articles are complaining about, and various other popular insanities in the software world (like inventing yet another pseudo-declarative probably-mostly-imperative programming language in YAML—so passé).

But… there also looks to be an awful lot of work gone into it, and it seems like it’s actually a real thing, that people use to do real stuff? And you have articles like this that seem serious and realistic? I just don’t understand what’s going on.

Yours sincerely,

Honestly Confused

The way that company has posted blog where they seem to have complete lack of understanding what graphql is and their comments on dev.to show a huge amount of disrespect.

The blogs posts comments themselves shows the company's author of these seems dense, rude and unknowledgeable in what they argue. Which also means their product they are making is likely being made by the same mindset.

Definitely wouldn't trust them.

It seems also like a ploy to get attention, which is definitely gonna keep me away from their product.

Seriously, check out these comment section. It's like they posted about something they have no clue about and then are gonna defend it to their grave regardless if they are wrong.

Wait until some security flaw comes out and this attitude makes them unwilling to admit they are wrong. Gross.

https://dev.to/polterguy/oop-a-software-development-mass-psy...

https://dev.to/polterguy/graphql-is-a-hot-smoking-pile-of-ga...

> Even if that was true, the above is 7 lines of code. That is 3.5 times as many LOC as my 2 liner. Science shows us that the amount of resources required to maintain code is proportional to the LOC count. Your example is hence 3.5 times more demanding in both initial resources to create it and resources required to maintain it. One of OOP's sales pitches was "that it makes it easier to maintain your code". You just scientifically proved it wrong ...

I think it has to be trolling, right? I haven't seen mention of LOC as a useful metric since the oughts.

That's why I remove all the newlines from my code before committing.

Anyone who's been in the game long enough will tell you that, outside of tight performance-critical loops, developer experience trumps everything. And you cannot reduce devX down to a single number.

> If OOP was a solution to anything really, we wouldn't need design patterns, clean architecture, or SOLID design principles.

He's not wrong. I loved moving from C to C++ polymorphic code is such a cool concept but after a while you realise it really doesn't solve anything on its own.

Then you start to encapsulate everything in an attempt to separate concerns then you realise that separation of concerns is actually quite easy if you separate data from function and make sure functions have no side effects, something OOP encourages the exact opposite of.

IMO, there is something going on here. Besides the large amount of inflaming articles published by aista, a lot of ... interesting articles show up when you google the people involved, if you go down that rabbit hole:

Company Information https://opencorporates.com/companies/cy/HE428124

Rants https://emalm.com/?v=gCuwY

Matches partner name from company information: https://www.kyivpost.com/article/content/ukraine-politics/ch...

> we’ll throw in hosting for you because we’re nice guys. This literally allows you to use your phone as a software development platform.

Turn down the millennialspeak just a bit...

I watched the demo, and it doesn't mention how this product scales. Who exactly is the audience here? What kind of services do you envision being built with Aista?

> Turn down the millennialspeak just a bit...

Sounds like you're a boomer! /s

I had the exact same question. I don't see myself coding from my phone, because typing on a on-screen keyboard is just awful.

I left the site after reading that bit of text, and I will never look back.

A video demo for a mobile dev platform that is not optimized for viewing on mobile?

Doesn't really give me high confidence in the actual product.

implies their product is weak

Yep, I came here to suggest them to change the format of that video into something that can be watched full screen on a phone without black bands on the sides.

> However, using your phone to create a web app is probably something you haven’t seen before.

About a year ago I have used my phone as an actual software development platform, writing a jam game in C with Allegro using Qt Creator as my IDE and bunch of other tools like GIMP and LMMS, by connecting the phone to an external display, keyboard and mouse: https://tins.amarillion.org/2021/log/entrant/4236

Also, many years ago I've been using my Neo Freerunner to develop bunch of Python code using nothing but its touchscreen, but I'm too old for that now ;)

Somewhat off topic war story time. About five years ago I was in hospital with appendicitis the day before Black Friday. We had a promotion set to run on our online store starting at midnight UK time (where we are). We are a tiny company, literally my wife, myself (the only tech) and at the time one other none technical employee. Fortunately, I thought, everything was ready to go, specific promotion code read to automatically run at midnight, so wasn’t too worried about being out of action.

Having been waiting all day I was finally sent down for surgery at 8pm, I was quite a low priority case. I vaguely remember waking up in recovery and being wheeled back to the ward. At just before midnight we are about to go live with the promotion so I take a quick look at the site and all is running fine. 12.00 ticks rounds, refresh the site, it’s gone, error 500, damn! I had overlooked something and broken the site just before the biggest proportion of the year.

Somehow, and I don’t fully remember, I manage to fix it from my phone. We host on Heroku, and my dev environment is on my laptop at home. I had a Digital Ocean VM sitting unused, but with key based auth only. I somehow manage to install a ssh client on my phone, grab the key from my password manager. Login and install the full dev environment (Python venv, Postgres, Node, Heroku CLI), debug and patch the code. And finally push the fix to Heroku.

I have no idea how long it took, I was certainly still fuzzy from the general anaesthetic, but I got it fixed!

I now ensure I always have a dev environment installed on a vm, and access setup from a ssh client on my phone.

It’s certainly possible to do software development, the traditional kind, from your phone, but I don’t recommend it.

We've got an IDE that is fully functioning on your phone. You can edit code directly in production with it, assuming you want to do that ofc. Not sure I'd encourage you to actually do it, but it IS possible :)

> Creating an app with Aista implies selecting properties using checkboxes, select dropdown lists, and high level UI components – Implying it’s equally easy to use your phone to create your apps, as using your desktop machine

The use of "implies" (twice!) in this paragraph seems very non-idiomatic to me.

I thought this was odd as well.

Caught my eye as well, it seems that they just really like that word. If you search on Google for "implies site:aista.com" you get 7 pages of results.

Hijacking the article, but has somebody managed to find a good iPhone/iPad keyboard for coding? I’m still able to do Python with the default keyboard, but I press a lot of times the symbol key.

The Wolfram Alpha custom keyboard on Android is absolutely the best keyboard for coding.

FWIW I travel with a Keychron K3

Might be useful for those living in poverty and don't have access to a PC?

...but have "€49 per month" to spend: https://aista.com/pricing/

Or, alternatively: https://puri.sm/posts/convergent-app-development/

Psst, at yo'all, one thing you're kind of like missing here, is that besides from the Angular compilation process, the video is in real time - During these 4 minutes, I'm producing apprx. 2,000 lines of backend code, and some 25,000+ lines of frontend Angular code ...

... just sayin' ... ;)

no doubt a lot of work went into this, I'm really curious if you've done any benchmarking w/ size and performance?

It's about 1.5 times slower than pure async ADO.NET using IConnection and IDataReader, implying (duh! :D) it's about 5 times faster than Python and twice as fast as PHP. As to memory, we're running our cloudlets on "dust" basically, still they perform better than the average PHP solution deployed into 10x as much HW.

It's also async to the core, implying it's probably about one order of magnitude better on throughput per HW compared to PHP and Python, possibly more.

To understand why, realise it's just a tiny abstraction on top of .Net version 6. Implying we've got almost the same traits in regards to performance as .Net 6.

Can’t bang the drum loud enough for how good Gitpod is. If you’re a Gitlab user it’s baked right into the services too: https://www.gitpod.io/

Makes jumping on multiple branches super useful right from an device as portable as a iPad or iPhone.

Looks very good, i hope there will be support for gitea!

Gitpod is a wonderful thing. I find myself reaching for that more and more, the whole ephemeral workspace concept is really fabulous.

Your comment seems completely unrelated to the topic at hand.

It’s another great way of using your phone as a full software development platform.

Hi guys and gals, thx for the confidence. Just wanted to let you know the product is open source, so there are no "walled gardens" here :)

As to my use of "imply", I'll change my language :D

English is my second language, and I should probably install Grammarly or something on my machine ;)

I think I could make do with a self-hosted instance of https://vscode.dev on a local machine that I could browse to from my phone. I wonder if that's something that exists...

Code-server: https://github.com/coder/code-server

I use it for work stuff. The $6 Digital Ocean droplets is enough to run it & a java compiler. All my code now lives there, local machine is basically empty. So when roaming between different networks & workstations (office, home), it's super simple. Just open up vs code and continue on. Only need ssh for it work. Oh and a stable internet connection makes a big difference.

The Visual Studio Code server, which literally lets you attach a real machine to vscode.dev, also exists: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/vscode-server

(The proxy service is invite only, but you can host the 100% local version using serve-local)

I've been looking for some way to code on my phone while I slack around away from my computer. So far the only thing working for me was CodeSandbox, but even it is very clunky and buggy.

Bluetooth keyboard and ssh client of your choice. Leave your work computer at home and ssh into it from anywhere. It works best for Vim enthusiasts, but nano is just as good.

This is just an ad for their product which provides a mobile interface.

Lot of advertisements disguised as blog entries on HN recently

Quote: "...and we’ll throw in hosting for you because we’re nice guys"

Another walled garden? No thank you, hard pass

Scratch, for apps. No thanks.

I would say that using your primary communication device as a development platform is a not good idea.

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