Hacker News Reader

Comment by robinhood | Hacker News Reader

Author of Monica/Chandler here. Thanks for posting this. As others have pointed out, we are rewriting Monica from scratch, codename Chandler: https://github.com/monicahq/chandler

We've also written OfficeLife, an open source tool to manage your employees: https://github.com/officelifehq/officelife, yet to be released.

I think we have too many ideas and side projects :-)

View on HN

I would really encourage you to push forward with OfficeLife. I believe the HR space is primed and ready for a decent open source offering. For what it's worth, APIs would be super useful, e.g. in the recruiting world there are hundreds of different background checks etc. that anyone serious needs to integrate with.

I am not too sure about officelife, but i think there is a market for internal relationship management at middle and large companies - often a mark of success is managing the internal network.

This has been badly damanged during lockdown - just walking past someone's desk and being reminded I need to speak to them was useful. And just saying hi kept the "relationship" fresh

Can this software be deployed locally? I wouldn't feel comfortable with putting all my contacts in cloud

It's open source and the readme offers (very basic) instructions on how to do this.

I've never heard of this software category before. For decades, I've managed this info with an online calendar (annual reminders for birthdays, for example), and online contact/address book (notes section heavily levegered). This is pretty cool - thanks for bringing it to my attention!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_information_manager

Chandler reminds me of another, I'll fated PIM project, documented in Dreaming in Code.

Might you be better off spending the effort on improving the codebase of the existing product instead of rewriting from scratch?

First, thank you for your work. I must admit though I was hoping that the rewrite would be in Go (or Rust) for the simple use case of a dead-simple binary deploy with a built in sqlite or rocks/level database that can handle as many users as you can throw at it on a $2-5 VPS instance.

There's a Docker image for Moncica which seems pretty dead-simple https://github.com/monicahq/docker

As a matter of fact, Monica has an official Docker image here: https://hub.docker.com/_/monica

(I'm super proud to say that we have an official Docker image, official being the label the Docker granted us last year as they (Docker, the company) maintain it. There are not a lot of official Docker images, but we are part of it, and it's awesome)

In terms of simplicity, nothing beats PHP. It's easily deployable everywhere, everyone knows how to use this simple language, and the Laravel ecosystem is fantastic. But I understand what you mean.

I've been using PHP for a decade and recently started building APIs in Go. Everything about the process has been significantly simpler, from packages to testing to deploying and debugging. I don't think I can ever go back, and this is coming from someone who still loves PHP and works with both Go and Laravel daily.

I've been exploring doing some of my PHP stuff in Go and my opinion has been the complete opposite. PHP, I can just start composing a page; Go, I have to implement a router and serving static content.

The Monica dev mentioned Laravel in this thread. In Laravel, one also must start with defining a router.

This is only true if you have a LAMP server already. On none of my servers runs PHP, so setting that up would be definitly more work than adding another binary to my systemd.

How so? If you use Docker, there are all-in-one images. If you use conventional deployment, there are howto guides and/or meta packages to get things up and running.

Besides, a lot of people use shared hosting for any number of reasons. Anything not PHP based is doomed there.

Why are you rewriting it from scratch?

Curious to learn more about the rewrite, do you have and docs handy?

Edit: should have scrolled down more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33612776

Is this exclusive web app? If so what privacy protections do you have?

You can self host. We highly recommend that you self host. We prefer if you self host. If you use our own version, it’s not as safe, obviously, even though we do our best to keep it secure.

Glad to see there is a future for monica. I've been a paid Monica user for a long time, and I've mostly been looking forward to a mobile app.

Is the Chandler name a reference to the Chandler PIM?

No. It's a codename in reference to Monica and the Friends tv show. Chandler being the one who dates Monica (no spoiler). Right now we have two repos on Github, but we have to find a way to merge Chandler to Monica in the future so we don't lose those precious stars :-)

When you manage to combine those repos, you should post one of those big road signs that says: MERGE!

It's a reference to Chanandler Bong.

MISS Chanandler Bong

Thank you for your work! I didn't realize software like this existed, will definitely try it out.

Just Monica?

Just Monika.

Why's it being rewritten? Looks like it's still PHP as well.

I usually despise comments that point out that two pieces of (almost always unrelated) software share the same (or a similar) name. That doesn't apply in this case—

Chandler has not only already been used for another piece of software, it has been used for something in what is roughly the same space. The other Chandler was discontinued >10 years ago, but I had to double check and triple check to suss out whether or not your Chandler is actually a reboot + a rewrite. And I'm still hedging (but I think the answer is "no, they're completely separate"). That's a confusing amount of similarity.

EDIT: it looks like this has been pointed out. Even though it's "just" a codename, I'd recommend changing it to something like "chauncey" or "bingaling" or "miss-bong" or "skidmark" or something.

In software, discontinued 10 years ago is like a language that’s been dead for 5,000.

Is everyone responding to this comment high or something?

> The other Chandler was discontinued >10 years ago, but[...]

wooosh

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends#Cast_and_characters

Parent isn’t wrong. Chandler was a very interesting distributed PIM in (I think) the very early 2000s. It collapsed under the weight of its own ambition but it’s a significant piece of software history, one of those alternative paths.

And yes it’s a TV character too, but Parent isn’t wrong to point out the name collision.

Your're wooshing yourself too. Chandler was a character on Friends. The parent project, Monica, is ALSO a character on Friends.

There is no wooosh in the comment, pal.

1. Knowing (or not knowing) that Chandler is a character on Friends has nothing to do with the comments here.

2. You are the woooshed. "Chauncey", "Bingaling", and "Miss [Chanandler] Bong" are all (semi-obscure) names that were used to refer to Chandler Bing at some point during the series. All suitable alternatives for a project codename. (Not that it matters, because, again whether one knows any of this has nothing to do with the issue being discussed. Your explanation is not exculpatory. It's not an affirmative defense. It's just... nothing. It's like a cow's opinion; it's moo.)

Try, like, reading or something.

The Monica /Chandler thing is a reference to the 90s television show “Friends”.

Correct.

Why do you think this is relevant to the topic of whether it's okay to use the name "Chandler" after having already been used for another personal information management tool?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com