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Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

> What if you could take your projects from 1 → n just like you would with Git? What worlds would it open for your development workflow if your infrastructure on Railway was fully versioned and reproducible?

> To implement Changesets, our team took inspiration from Git.

Putting things nicely, I don't think people love git for it's elegance. After all, it was conceived and developed as an alternative to proprietary VCS software. Presenting a proprietary solution as "Git for X" is a catch-22. Most people will see the "pricing" button and register that immediately; you're not making Git, but instead selling a service.

It's a bit off-topic, and I don't expect any direct response. It just burns me up when ad copy buries it's lede so far.

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Wait no- comments like this are what I enjoy. I personally struggle with the whole dichotomy of "marketing led" writing and then balancing that with just spending 2,000 words talking through test frameworks and cases. Maybe for a future blogpost, but the idea of stateful state tracking is a rabbit hole I can get buried under.

To address your main point, I think Git is in the same camp of Python's origins. Powerful despite the creator's initial intentions. Where like it or not, it becomes a powerful mental API to interact with domains. (Git -> Changesets, Python -> Notebooks/Repls)

When I was working on the material for the feature, I kept on trying to find a parallel that fit within people's mental model without it being a leaky abstraction. (Of course my colleague helps make me sound sane.) Other ideas to get people's attention was talking a bit about YAML, but to your point- I hate the bashing that most DevOps companies do that say: K8s is EVIL!!11!!!. Or end DevOps11!!!!!! - it's a series of practices that help you for an outcome, in the same way how Git, SVN, Mercurial, help you and a team track changes.

Changesets is just one way to maintain a production/infra practice a suite of recommendations that a team can adopt.

Thanks for commenting and I hope it was an interesting read :3

> I kept on trying to find a parallel that fit within people's mental model without it being a leaky abstraction

It's a good analog, but doesn't mention a credit card as a hard-dependency :p

With all seriousness, I'm sure you're working on a swell tool. I also understand how difficult it is writing confident ad copy. This still sends the wrong message though, and I'm afraid you're going to get a lot of users belly-laughing at a Git comparison for non-GPL software. That's my only real comment on the thing.

Good luck with your service otherwise!

I hate that too- but the fraud... (And totally heard, I think the distinction on the product comparison vs. the GPL is useful.)

(Also if you send me an email to angelo@railway (dot) app- I will throw some credits your way so you can play around with it.)

Hey, GNU solved fraud by not assuming that the user wants to pay them a dime. It's been a very successful model at-scale! (albeit hardly profitable)

> I will throw some credits your way so you can play around with it.

I'm not poormouthing you here, if that's what you mean. It's just a bad comparison that almost deliberately ignores the reason for git's development and widespread adoption. It exits the domain of a meaningful metaphor and skates straight into confusion.

Again, I wish you luck. This marketing just doesn't fit for the product you're selling, and that lack of clarity will cost you conversions and waste your time. My $0.02.

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