I really like the spirit of this, and I hate to be the gnu in the room, but the only thing holding this back is that it's centralised.
Again, I totally get how that might sound stupid. "How can we have nice things if we always need to solve the decentralisation problem first?", is one of a billion reasonable responses to my comment, but I'm just a guy who has gotten his heart broken before by the likes of Geocities, which they reference directly in the Overview video.
I trust FogCreek a lot more than I ever trusted Yahoo!, but I still never stray too far from the sidewalk anymore.
Just FYI while it is definitely centralized, and you are correctly tensing up at the sight of that, here are the "Advanced" options you get when managing a project: http://i.imgur.com/ohDUnKI.png
You can import any code from a Github repository you have, or export the project you're working on to a Github repository, or download a .tgz of the entire thing. Anil's opinions on "the web we lost"[0] fit into the ethos of Fog Creek and co well, I think.
I think its a great idea by still cant get past the new latest name for it. HyperDev was geared toward the technical crowd, But GoMix??? It speaks to no one...
The name reminded me of a derogatory term for patients. Or a Go library called "mix". Those reservations aside, it does seem descriptive of what the service actually does. Still, it lacks the charm of "StackOverflow," or the uniqueness of "Trello."
Exactly this. It's like saying shadertoy is bad because it's centralized. When in reality it doesn't matter because everyone is going to lift their code out to their production env when they're done experimenting.
I think the OP's concerns with centralization is that over time this might become a great collection of fun/useful/interesting/<insert adjective here> sites, just like geocities, but because it is centralized it can all irrevocably just go away one day at the whim of the controlling company. Just like geocities.
That's a fair concern. There are two paths I think we'll offer to address the issue.
First, the code you're running is just totally standard Node.js, and we've got easy tools for taking what you make and running it anywhere else, if you want.
Second, we'll be building more reasons that you'd want to stay in the Gomix community — features that give you benefit from being in a network. In some ways it's similar to Stack Overflow, in that everybody owns what they contribute, but having a place to do so benefits everyone.
I don't see how centralization is a big concern in this case. One of the fundamental features is that you can take the code anytime and hoist it up anywhere you please.
If anything centralization in this case just greases the skids to running quickly without any lock-in.
They're both online editors that use the word "remix", but that's really it.
Mozilla Thimble is a HTML/CSS/JS learning tool. It's frontend only and doesn't have realtime collaboration.
Gomix is backend and frontend. It's collaborative, so a team can work on it at the same time. They're looking to change how teams work together by replacing version control. It also deploys instantly, so there's no saving/uploading/pushing/etc.
Amazed me to read the part of Joel's side of this where he talks about the staff counts at Stack Overflow and Trello. I remember the early days of his blog, SO, and when Trello was announced. Now Trello has 100 staff and SO has 300.
I love Fog Creek and use Trello daily. I'm your target audience. If you could make this self-hosted i.e. on my own company's intranet secure servers, I would pay a lot for it.
Ditto. It'll would be awesome if there was an ability to download the files you 'remixed' so you can self host.
It could serve as a great educational tool too. Something that would allow people who are overwhelmed to get their feet wet and 'build something functional'. Getting 'hello world' to print on a console is cool, but it won't excite someone as much as getting a live website to print 'hello world'.
Things have changed since 99. The walled gardens are up. Credit cards are required everywhere. I hope the 'casual' programmer can fill out all these forms and not be scared by AUTH_TOKENS. I wish gomix had a pool of community accounts. (eg for Twilio where you get like 100 free texts and you just hack on).
quick setup'n'go in 1999
was mostly a php/perl web provider. is AUTH_TOKEN really too
much different for having to set up a mysql
db in '99 and putting in DB_HOST, DB_PORT, DB_USER and DB_PASS ?
thats what a lot if the LAMP stacks had back then at a minimum. then make a page woth php_info in it and carefully scan the verbose output to see what your cgi renderer was compiled with
Yes. DB_HOST and co. are stuff you run locally on your own computer. AUTH_TOKEN means you're stuck with some external service, that will probably charge you at some point.
Running servers for Alexa or sending texts for Twilio are not free so they have to have some sort of registration or payment or go broke. I don't think those services were available in 99 so that's different.
A few years ago I got into the habit of using alternate languages to HTML, CSS, and Javascript---namely Pug, Stylus, and Coffeescript---and I'm physically unable to use the originals any more. Are these supported by Gomix?
No, I work in a laboratory. Web dev is a hobby for me, and it seems Gomix is designed for hobbyists. There are many hobbyists I know who share the same opinion, so it would nice for Gomix to support languages which emit HTML/CSS/JS.
so while I'm coding, the site is down for my users? (because half written code throws errors until finished)
I like the auto-deploy because the iteration cycle is amazing for testing and realtime collab, but it would be great if I it auto-deployed to a staging area, then when satisfied promote that to be live...
As a native Russian speaker, I can't help but notice that the name sounds really close to the Russian offensive word for homosexual people - 'gomik's. Can't say if it's going to negatively affect the product but it's certainly not a good thing. Mitsubishi Pajero is not being sold in the Americas under that name for a reason.
We did find that out after launch, as it unfortunately hadn't come up in our searches prior to that. I personally apologize for the offensive name and we'll be directly addressing it soon enough thanks to several Russian speakers who have pointed out the issue.
Thanks for bringing it up, and I'm sorry we didn't catch it earlier.
Considering there are probably many thousands of developer hours invested in this, I hope Fog Creek invests ten or thirty hours into making some quick and dirty youtube videos showing starting from scratch and building out a a few full apps with persistence, some integrations, etc so we can see what that involves. I still don't completely understand what GoMix is exactly from the video shown here.
No, please, not a video — this is the most inefficient way of conveying information about a product aimed at developers. Just write a well-structured text tutorial.
While I agree the numbers seem to be on the side of videos as far as I can tell.
Honestly I would like if they did both. Sometimes I like to just listen to videos while I'm doing other things and sometimes I like to be able to just skim through an article.
is that why there's so many videos these days, sounds plausible - I agree they make skimming very difficult. I think videos are cheaper to make to, just record a session and talk over it.
Young person here! (at least I hope I still count!)
My anecdotal data point: the homepage only seemed to have a video explanation, I dropped off right then because I didn't want to watch a 2 minute video about how this works.
When I search a page I'm looking for a description and a bit of context. You might be able to search a video thanks to autotranscripts. Then you have to scrub to be sure the keyword is in the correct context.
For "getting a feel", I find video is fine. For actual learning, I agree not so efficient, but video can be excellent for deciding whether a person is interested in digging deeper.
But we'll be sure to work on some video examples - I appreciate people learn in different ways. For a quick overview of Gomix, see https://gomix.com/about/
Ditto. This is my second or third exposure to this project and I'm still not sure what the heck it is, and what the value add is. I understand things like setting up DBs, wiring up a front and back end, etc... But this? I don't get it. It seems like it's supposed to be an easy to use, but powerful and extensible, way to build apps, but it doesn't necessarily look any easier. And it looks complex in its own way.
So yeah, I'd like a really robust tutorial (text, preferably, I don't like to sit and watch videos) which shows the creation of a full featured web app with persistent data storage, and a dynamic front end. Something with robust functionality so we can see how something like that is built.
Yep, this is a good idea. We've been holding off so that we can use the community's actual creations as the examples, and that's what we'll feature when we make clearer introductions to Gomix. Some will be videos, some will be written out, and maybe we'll do other formats as well.
"We have a persistent file system, so anything you store within your project is kept. This means you can use files as a flat file database, or save your database files locally (see our SQLite3 and NeDB examples). You can also use third-party storage services, like a hosted MongoDB database or Redis (see our MongoDB example).
We recommend creating a folder called ‘.data’ as a safe place to store your database files. This folder isn’t copied across when a project is remixed."
We'll be looking to add some simple to use database type functionality. We've only recently launched, so expect the product to develop over the coming months.
I love Gomix. I spent the past weekend helping a friend migrate a static front-end only CSS skin they had made over to a live server on Gomix. That friend has moved onto running webpack and babel locally to do more advanced stuff, but Gomix was a godsend in helping demonstrate to him that the problemspace isn't as horrifyingly large as he expected. We communicated and "code reviewed" via writing comments to each other in js files. It was a really pleasant experience.
I loved it when it was called Hyperdev too. At first I didn't really get it (I work at Stack Overflow so we're part of the same extended family meaning my first impression of Hyperdev was before it was as polished), honestly at first I was angry they were even spending the time doing something I considered so stupid. Until I had a use for it.
I had gotten a Raspberry Pi foundation touch-screen LCD, spent my Saturday morning setting it up, had a grandiose idea of what I wanted to make using it (basically just a "smart" note / TODO / grocery list manager I could attach to my fridge's door) and... realized I had to write yet-another-webapp. I've been making web apps for around a dozen years. The last thing I want to do in my life is spend the time writing the basics of a web-app.
My idea was going to be a thing where I'd use Trello (wow this is becoming an ad for all my sister companies remind me to plug FogBugz, Kiln, and CityDesk at some point too) as the "data store". I have Trello boards for everything. Work to-dos, Personal to-dos, even a trello list for the records I own and the records I want to own.
After writing the basics of what I wanted down, I started sketching the UI. And you know what? After I had all that set, I was able to make a prototype of the entire thing in less than 15 minutes using Gomix (at the time Hyperdev). You can view my prototype here: https://coal-sting.gomix.me/
I didn't end up building the full flow, but I've been coming back to the Gomix project every month or two and adding one-more-MVP-checklist-feature to my prototype. And once I'm done with it? I can take all the JS I wrote, put it into a project bundled with webpack like the rest of my projects, and place it directly onto my RPi and touchscreen.
I know Gomix looks deceptively simple, but that's exactly why I love it. I really value minimizing the time it takes to go from "ooh that's a cool idea" to "holy shit I'm actually working on the idea and not the cruft and skeleton code I need to work on before I get to work on the idea itself!"
Half the time the reason why I stop working on a side project is because I'm getting bored before I get to even work on the real side project. I am always just looking for an excuse to give up and go back to playing video games.
Gomix is perfect for me. I can't wait until they support more languages so I can throw away all the time I've spent and code I've written making templates[0] and bootstrappers[1] for myself.
This sounds forced/scripted beyond belief. It really reads like an Amazon review written in exchange of a product:
> I love my FooBar 2001. I spent the past weekend migrating my dishwasher's contents into my new FooBar 2001 and it was a very pleasant experience. I was intimidated by how much work it would be at first but to my surprise it was A BREEZE. I'm so happy now with my new Foobar 2001 that I will probably use my dishwasher as a litterbox.
I mean... I work for a related company (as mentioned in the post)... sorry for being excited about something they're working on?
I just felt the need to comment because a lot of the comments remind me of my first impression of the product before I really gave it a chance.
I was so angry they were working on it, they started working on it after a quiet period following the Fog Creek / Trello split and my first impression was they were merely looking for something to waste their time doing, it just didn't make sense. But, I tried it, and damn I love it.
You can go look through my 5 years worth of HN comments if you'd like, when I like something I am always this excited about it.
Yeah, very valid. The comment was stream-of-consciousness because I saw this post when I got home from a pre-new-years-eve party last night.
Honestly with the rest of this thread and the feedback though, I wish I hadn't posted it at all. I used to really enjoy participating in this community.
Anil Dash is one of the most notorious social justice warriors in the tech world. It's unfortunate Fog Creek made him its CEO - I don't predict the company will flourish under him, since he seems more concerned with promoting an airy political agenda than with making good products. He's non-technical (I don't think he's ever written a line of code in his life, and knows next to nothing about the actual craft of building software), yet he's somehow been able to parlay his way into positions of influence by guilt tripping white liberals into giving him power.
A few examples (among many) from his sterling career:
1. He was part of the SJW lynch mob, started by Gawker, that got Pax Dickinson (CTO of Business Insider) fired for out of context joking tweets Pax had written years prior.
2. He only retweets women on Twitter and has been quite explicit about it, dressing it up as 'fighting sexism.' I guess you fight sexism by adopting sexist policies? Kind of bizarre.
As far as I can tell, Dash's only real skills are self-promotion and virtue signaling. From my moderate amount of research, I can't find any actual products he's released that have been successful or widely adopted. Good luck Fog Creek, you're gonna need it!
I used to really respect Joel Spolsky. I've read all of his stuff and really liked it.
But I can't help thinking that Fog Creek just isn't that important of a company. As a decidedly "technical" person, I don't know a single person that uses any of their products. And I really do mean, zero. I know plenty of people that use git, IntelliJ, github, Stack Overflow, Twilio, AWS, Firebase, Google Cloud Platform, MongoDB, Pivotal Tracker, hell even JIRA, but nothing from Fog Creek. Ten years in the trenches, writing software, and never have I even once used, or even _met_ anyone that uses their stuff.
Furthermore, the world has kinda moved on. We aren't shipping desktop software anymore and also, it's not enough to release to the web, either. These days people expect mobile apps, complex responsive design, and 1000 other things you didn't need to do 10 years ago. Software is increasingly becoming a field dominated by teams of specialists in all areas, and I just don't get the sense that Gomix was built with this new reality in mind.
Second. I first heard of this guy (Anil) only about a month ago, when I came upon Joel's blog. I heard that he became CEO and yeah, I agree with a lot of what you've written -- a windbag with a political agenda who's great at self-promotion. Honest question though, does this make for a great CEO? We can certainly look to really cerebral guys like Bill Gates as a model for a tech CEO, but consider that Jeff Bezos apparently wasn't a developer. Also consider that more problems in tech are basically "solved" at this point, and as the industry matures, things like promotion and marketing are getting increasingly important. Satya Nadella (Microsoft) himself acknowledged this; I just read last week that Microsoft had some kind of senior meeting, and Satya was on a rant about how MS's culture is too engineering-driven for today's world. I don't have the temperament to be as much of a self-promoter as a guy like Anil, but I know plenty of companies that seem to be run by these guys, like Buffer, Groove, or anyone else specializing in "content marketing", and it seems to be working for them.
So before you dismiss this guy, think of what it takes to make a good tech CEO. I fucking loathe self-promoters, really I do, but I'm becoming increasingly convinced that's what it takes to make it in the sort of CRUDdy "tech" that isn't too research-heavy, which is most of software, these days (not autonomous vehicles, genetics, deep learning, thorium reactors, etc)
Even if somebody will agree with this opinion, 2 questions are not solved: 1) non-tech person shouldn't present product for programmers; 2) his "I'm CEO" is still too annoyingly repetitive.
"I don't know a single person that uses any of their products."
I would say, Fog Creek created one of the most important pieces of software in history and one of the most used. It is called "Stack Overflow". Sure. Quote how they are technically are not owned by FogCreek and Joel is just a CEO there. But that is lawyers, you know, lawyer-ing.
"In 2008, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky created Stack Overflow, a question-and-answer Web site for computer programming questions, which they described as an alternative to the programmer forum Experts-Exchange."
"Retrofitting" SO to have been made by FogCreek is obviously to put the company in some better light. It was Jeff that came to Joel and had this idea, and it was not implemented within FogCreek.
> I used to really respect Joel Spolsky. I've read all of his stuff and really liked it.
After reading the rest of your post, I'm not sure why.
Joel Spolsky always seemed to me like he was all hat and no cattle -- he had rather strong opinions (and a high opinion of himself) for someone who ran a small company that never did anything of significance.
He has always seemed rather fixated on some kind of superiority complex and separating good programmers from bad, but why should anyone believe that he is one of the good ones? What is he an authority on -- writing software nobody wants to use?
At the end of the day, as industries mature, you can, in aggregate, segregate things into a couple of platitudes. You have those products that will absolutely require marketing and promotion to move forward, because incremental progress on a product is not enough alone to move it forward (Think of your average ICE car, how different are they nowadays really? If you take the emotion out of the equation, they're really not too different). Then there will be those that are on the cutting edge frontier, where the action and innovation happens (Again, cars, where there is a different is something like Tesla or the chevy bolt, and that requires a LOT of pure research, development, engineering etc). If you don't like one, you should probably pursue the other. There isn't as much middle ground as things mature. Financial services is another great example of this. Cutting edge privately held funds is where all the quants go because it's interesting (with some exceptions, i'm talking in aggregate), where as your JP Morgans or your Bank of Americas tend to be all about marketing (even on the various other services they provide that you don't usually see TV commercials for, or web ads, or what have you).
If this is true, and it seems true, no founder in Silicon Valley should do business or in any way support Anil Dash in anything.
I would chastise Joel Spolsky and that other guy too, but it seems unnecessary given the destruction they're inflicting on their own business by letting him run it. Hah.
Yeah HN has anonymous accounts so people can speak more freely. I have a day job and I bet this guy knows the CEO at my company and could probably get me fired. I just want to state my position, not create an escalating personal war with the guy. But if I was wealthy I would call him out in my own name as loudly as possible. In my opinion there are few worse things you can do then try to blackball someone from an industry. I think it's grounds for your own excommunication.
"He flat out said that he wants his startup to be funded and wasn't sure if it'd be possible after all of his, and I replied that it realistically wasn't going to happen without the say-so of someone like me, and I wasn't inclined to give some VC the nod on this. On reflection, I'll be explicit: If you're a venture capitalist, and you invest in Pax's startup without a profound, meaningful and years-long demonstration of responsibility from Pax beforehand, you're complicit in extending the tech industry's awful track record of exclusion, and it's unacceptable."
This is clearly a threat that Anil Dash will make trouble for any VC that funds him. This truly sounds so unethical that it might be criminal extortion.
I have no history or relationship with him. I just came across someone publicly trying to use his power against a fellow founder and I wanted to publicly (and anonymously) despise him for it.
Oh my. I almost wish you hadn't posted that link, or that I hadn't clicked it. But I guess I'm grateful.
> I hope that Pax's friends in the pick up artist community take a few moments away from writing date rape manuals and sending me death threats to reflect on the fact that their new hero has at least some tiny bit of respect for the wife he's been married to for 15 years. How crushed they will be.
> Pax showed up about 10 minutes late, having been busy with the latest stop on his press tour, and as I had agreed, I called him an asshole to his face and paid for his coffee. We talked for about 20 minutes. He offered up a pretty boringly conventional defense of male privilege, and when I described the role of actual satire and comedy in punching up instead of punching down, he revealed that he sees attacking feminists and equality activists as punching up. There was some pointless bickering from me about the inanity of that perspective, but overall things were fairly civil; I've met guys like this before and I didn't have any illusion that I was going to dissuade him from a perspective which his social group rewards with attention and the perverse impression that acting like an asshole is somehow being brave.
This is the new CEO of Fog Creek? In all fairness, he did say he was "fighting off a brutal chest cold". But WTF? I've had chest colds too, so has everyone. They never provoked me to being this nasty, whatever the reason.
I am sad. I thought Joel had some interesting insights, and Fog Creek was involved in some truly interesting and useful products like Stack Overflow and Trello.
But if someone like that is now running the show, it doesn't give me much hope for their future products.
> More broadly, I am trying to live a life where I am as unreasonably kind as I can be.
Yeah, sounds exactly like the guy he is. I mean what else could someone be that thinks people who don't share his world-view are "supremacist assholes", that blacklisting others (or trying to blacklist them, whatever) is completely okay be than "trying to live a life where I am as unreasonably kind as I can be".
Equally I hate it when tech C-execs have never written a line of code, but you come across as politically charged with personal attacks rather than recognising his suitability for the role based on direct and relevant experience. And if we're going to be frank about pd's "out of context joking tweets" here they are:
"In The Passion Of The Christ 2, Jesus gets raped by a pack of niggers. It's his own fault for dressing like a whore though."
"aw, you can't feed your family on minimum wage? well who told you to start a fucking family when your skills are only worth minimum wage?"
"feminism in tech remains the champion topic for my block list. my finger is getting tired."
1. Calling the tweets that got Pax Dickinson fired "out of context" is fairly hilarious. Pax was a contrarian, who enjoyed making provocative statements. Eventually, those bit him in the ass. Reason did a fairly fair-minded article on the whole thing: http://reason.com/archives/2015/07/09/the-social-media-shami...
2. Not even sort of bizarre.
3. Anil reached out to a journalist and apparently made a valid point. The accusation of "coercion" has no basis in known facts. Your link is literally a guy quoting three tweets and making wild claims about what MIGHT have happened behind the scenes.
I'm not going to pick on you specifically here, but this is a great place for me to highlight something.
I think folks in tech (and society at large, frankly) have a bit of a fundamental misunderstanding of what comprises discrimination and sexism. The systematic disenfranchisement of a gender/race/ethnicity whatever term you want to use, often is not remedied without some kind of equality of status, that's what 'retweeting only women' is doing. Its giving equality of status to women that they likely would not usually have. Fundamentally I think its hard for a lot of folks to grasp this, even those who have historically been discriminated against when it comes to something they don't understand, part of that is human nature, but over and over again actual psychological studies and sociology studies show again and again that when you give people equality of status only then do things change. [0][1][2][3]
As far as Pax goes, CTO of a growing (and arguably large at the time even) should have known better, and frankly, his comments, joke or not, were inexcusable. I also don't care what people may say about what people say in private, because that is something I cannot react to, because I'm not party to that conversation, but this took place on a public forum, and it was in very poor taste at a minimum, and given an executive at a company, likely someone with such poor taste on a public forum as such I can't imagine was doing much for bettering workplace standards. This may be complete conjecture which I acknowledge. With that said, in my experience dealing with people who tend to act the same way in a public forum, in private they're more often than not just as inexcusable.
Point 1 is ridiculous. What company in the public eye would allow an exec to tweet the n* word, jesus, and sex acts all at the same time and do nothing about it?
Anil could have begged BI to forgive him and it wouldn't have helped. Pax placed a time bomb under his own bed with that tweet and it was destined to go off if BI ever found it.
Hey throwaway, this is a link to my personal blog. Our official company posts aren't about me, just the one on my site is. You'll also find my personal Instagram has pictures of me & my kid and my personal Tumblr has some songs and pictures that I like.
This is actually helping me learn nodejs. I'm so happy right now! I'm gonna be messing around with the very basic todo app as I learn more about node/express.
I wasn't implying you directly, as it seems (from comments in this thread), that you are benefitting from a wave of PC-pressure. The internet-collectivist movement is strong, so it could have quite easily been a fan.
In any case, it's cool that you're responding to a thread about your blog. I wish you and yours nothing but health and happiness in 2017 from here in Russia.
Anil, I don't know you, and you certainly don't know me. But I have a word of advice.
When you join a company a few weeks before it releases a new software product, have the humility to admit that you had precious little to do with it. Don't write about yourself, at all! Write about the product, what it can do for me, and the amazing team who built it.
I'm going to go way out of line and do a bit of a hatchet job on your writing, because this is honestly how it came across to me when I read your post. Here are your exact words, with a few ellipses thrown in to emphasize the point.
> I'M AT FOG CREEK…I’m the new CEO of Fog Creek Software!
> If you know me…It’s no secret that I’ve become increasingly critical of the conventional tech world’s lack of focus on ethics, humanity, and inclusion.
> [Fog Creek's] brilliant and thoughtful founders Michael and Joel were willing to trust me to be the CEO of the company that have so carefully shepherded all these years. [sic]
> …after challenges like shutting down ThinkUp earlier this year, I started reckoning a bit with how to be most effective in pushing the tech industry to be a little more thoughtful. This personal inflection point became clearer as the team at Activate released this year's Activate Outlook — seven years after we'd set out to create the leading strategy consulting company, I realized we'd not just succeeded, but done so to the degree where the team could now run effectively without me being involved day-to-day. Between stepping back to an advisory role at Activate and sharpening the focus of my work for the organizations whose boards I serve on, I was able to bring some clarity to the work in front of me.
> I realized that I wanted to fully engage myself with a single, all-encompassing role that would use all my skills, and that Fog Creek's legacy of leading the industry made it the perfect place to try and push things forward again. So now, I have a simple answer if someone at a cocktail party asks what I do.
> What do I do? I'm the CEO of a small software company in downtown Manhattan that’s as influential in the tech world as companies 1000 times our size.
> For the past several years, I found that the overhead of provisioning servers, or trying to maintain a dev environment, or wrangling with version control took all the fun out of coding for me, to the point where I don’t just hack on things for fun anymore. I can’t imagine how much more intimidating it would be if I hadn’t spent many years coding.
Tell me, does any of this have anything to do with… What was the product called again? What does it do for me? And how can you helpfully communicate that value?
Now I realize this post was on your personal blog. So a bit of self-indulgence is understandable. But still… Is all of this about you, or about a great company and its new product that you were lucky enough to be asked to be involved with?
I should admit that I'm probably just jealous. How in the world do you get a publication like TechCrunch to give you personal credit for this product when you had so little to do with it? Their headline from 12/6: "Anil Dash, new CEO of Fog Creek, launches platform to remove barriers to app development"
Oh, you are right. I never heard of this guy before, but this quote from his "about" page is choice: "His Twitter account is the only one that’s been retweeted by the White House, Bill Gates and Prince, a succinct summarization of Dash’s interests."
Depends, I think having a bio that seems too self-congratulatory is not as bad as, say, perpetrating systemic violence or oppression against entire groups of people. Some can disagree with that, I guess.
For another perspective, I wouldn't spend ten seconds reading yet another announcement of yet another software product, but I'll read a post by and about Anil Dash repeatedly.
I don't know you, and you certainly don't know me, but I suspect Dash knows his target audience for this particular post pretty well. The product-focused posts are somewhere else, not his personal blog, and chances are they're gathering dust, speaking relatively and metaphorically.
Maybe the Gomix product should pivot to be more about Anil, less about that dry, boring code. They could put in some kind of interface to view all his tweets and blog posts in one place.
I have to disagree, this feels like piling on. Let me add lack of humility and narcissism really peeve me but I just didn't get that from his post.
Remember, the article was in fact meant to be about his new role. The title starts out "I'm at Fog Creek...". Given that he's within scope with what he wrote.
Personally, I would never list celebrities that have retweeted me and recoil at even the thought of doing such a thing. But we have to interpret things as generously as possible. I know people who would talk about Prince retweeting them just as a matter of fact thing that seemed cool to take note of.
Put simply, this was my personal blog post, so it was about me & my feelings about the moment. On our company blog, or on Medium, we (as Fog Creek) wrote about the Gomix product and the only mention of me was a little blurb at the bottom. Both of these choices seem appropriate to me.
Thanks for the levelheaded reply. After reflecting on it a bit, I think you and WhitneyLand are right. It would have been a different thing if this were the company blog, but this was your personal blog, so of course it's completely reasonable to talk about yourself.
I was out of line, and I am sorry for the harsh tone of my comments.
No problem — that's context that may not have been obvious with the way the link was posted. Thanks for being willing to reconsider! Hope you'll check out Gomix, too. :)
You could write it off as 'just' a web-based Node JS IDE. That is a large part of what it technically delivers. But here's a few points that we think makes it more useful and accessible to a much larger group of users than would ever typically use such a thing: https://gomix.com/about/
It's basically jsfiddle or codepen for nodejs. I have to admit, it's pretty interesting. I'm bias as I look at this from a teaching perspective and it makes it a lot simpler to just get into the meat. Looking at the code, there's a bit of magic. If you spin up the parse server it states that it requires a monogodb ENV key yet it'll just work without one. I'd imagine they are spinning up services behind the scenes.
Doesn't look like there's currently any way to add more modules. At least I haven't found it yet. Interested in testing out the import feature...
I wonder, is there a quick way to learn what's that all about without watching a video? As usual, seems like good old text reading/writing skills are ignored...
May be in reading it wrong, but that page contains another video, couple example snapshots and "why we built this". I still have no idea what all the fuzz is about, and I'm not wasting my time on videos.
Gomix is the easiest way to build the app or bot of your dreams.
With working example apps to remix, a code editor to modify them, instant hosting and deployment - anybody can build a web app on Gomix, for free.
Start by remixing.
You never have to start from a blank slate. Remix a full, working app to personalize it for your needs, or build on the most popular and powerful developer frameworks to create your app.
Real collaboration.
You don’t have to deal with the complexity of version control or tracking changes — the built-in editor allows multiple people to edit code at once and undo mistakes as they happen, just like working together in Google Docs.
It's not training wheels.
Gomix is not a limited "toy" version of a real developer environment — your Gomix app is hosted on the exact same industry standard infrastructure that the best developers use to run their apps.
We handle the mess.
While you work with Gomix, we seamlessly upgrade your servers and cloud infrastructure in the background. There’s no deployment or server provisioning because it all happens automatically.
Why Did We Make Gomix?
In some ways, Gomix is a throwback to an older era of software or the internet, when there were simpler ways to get started making cool stuff. For people who were around at that time, they'll understand Gomix easily: We’re bringing “View Source” back. Of course, they didn't literally take “View Source” out of web browsers, but the ability to just look at the code behind something, and tweak it, and make your own thing, was essential to making the Internet fun, and weird, and diverse, in its early days. And that has sadly disappeared.
Similarly, in even earlier eras, tools like HyperCard on the Mac and Visual Basic on Windows democratized software creation, letting regular individuals or casual business users create useful apps to meet their needs. During development, Gomix was even called “HyperDev”, as a nod to this history — and its early-90s aesthetic subtly nods to that heritage, too.
Whether we look at simple issues like being able to do fun things with an Amazon Echo, or hugely complex issues like trying to make tech and programming more inclusive, Gomix has a role to play in solving problems that matter. And we’re going to have fun doing it!
1/4 of the article about what is Fog Creek and how well everyone knows it.
1/4 of the article about culture and other guys and... I don't know what the hell it's talking about. I'm not even bothering reading half the sentence anymore.
1/4 Then it's talking about other unrelated products now? Outlook something.
> "Gomix brings back the fun of the “view source” web"
Oh finally. I had to re-read the article 3 times to find something about the new product, only at the end of the article!
Finished reading. Don't know what the product is about or what it's intended for.
Is it a AB testing software? Is it a a PageHacker[1] clone? Don't know.
The big news on the page is that Anil Dash was hired as Fog Creek Software's CEO. The blog was published the same day it was announced. The name change of the product is sort of incidental: GoMix was previously named HyperDev.
Most of Gomix is totally standard open source infrastructure, and people can release projects on Gomix under any license they want. We don't currently have plans to open source the parts of Gomix that run the community or enable remixing apps, but we'll follow the community's lead based on what they need.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 263 ms ] threadAgain, I totally get how that might sound stupid. "How can we have nice things if we always need to solve the decentralisation problem first?", is one of a billion reasonable responses to my comment, but I'm just a guy who has gotten his heart broken before by the likes of Geocities, which they reference directly in the Overview video.
I trust FogCreek a lot more than I ever trusted Yahoo!, but I still never stray too far from the sidewalk anymore.
You can import any code from a Github repository you have, or export the project you're working on to a Github repository, or download a .tgz of the entire thing. Anil's opinions on "the web we lost"[0] fit into the ethos of Fog Creek and co well, I think.
[0] http://anildash.com/2012/12/the-web-we-lost.html
I recently used it to play with websockets and being centralized was the main reason it worked so well.
First, the code you're running is just totally standard Node.js, and we've got easy tools for taking what you make and running it anywhere else, if you want.
Second, we'll be building more reasons that you'd want to stay in the Gomix community — features that give you benefit from being in a network. In some ways it's similar to Stack Overflow, in that everybody owns what they contribute, but having a place to do so benefits everyone.
If anything centralization in this case just greases the skids to running quickly without any lock-in.
So I made this:
http://i.imgur.com/OJ3ZgDD.jpg
Mozilla Thimble is a HTML/CSS/JS learning tool. It's frontend only and doesn't have realtime collaboration.
Gomix is backend and frontend. It's collaborative, so a team can work on it at the same time. They're looking to change how teams work together by replacing version control. It also deploys instantly, so there's no saving/uploading/pushing/etc.
Source: https://learning.mozilla.org/blog/introducing-the-new-thimbl... and https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/05/31/introducing-hyperd...
We just got in a new agile rhythmn.
Maybe there will be Kiln integration at some point?
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/06/anil-dash-is-the-n...
It could serve as a great educational tool too. Something that would allow people who are overwhelmed to get their feet wet and 'build something functional'. Getting 'hello world' to print on a console is cool, but it won't excite someone as much as getting a live website to print 'hello world'.
"Set up your Alexa skill in your Amazon developer account."
"TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID and TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN - available from https://www.twilio.com/user/account/settings"
...
Things have changed since 99. The walled gardens are up. Credit cards are required everywhere. I hope the 'casual' programmer can fill out all these forms and not be scared by AUTH_TOKENS. I wish gomix had a pool of community accounts. (eg for Twilio where you get like 100 free texts and you just hack on).
thats what a lot if the LAMP stacks had back then at a minimum. then make a page woth php_info in it and carefully scan the verbose output to see what your cgi renderer was compiled with
For a fuller example, the Gomix site is also built using those technologies, and you can view their code too: https://gomix.com/#!/project/community
the video targets, manager, who probably dont care what this is ... and maybe developers who are very familiar with this domain
i guess, either, it is targeted as a niche app for specific people or .. they messed up badly
I like the auto-deploy because the iteration cycle is amazing for testing and realtime collab, but it would be great if I it auto-deployed to a staging area, then when satisfied promote that to be live...
Could be worse, imagine a product named Gopnik /s
Thanks for bringing it up, and I'm sorry we didn't catch it earlier.
Honestly I would like if they did both. Sometimes I like to just listen to videos while I'm doing other things and sometimes I like to be able to just skim through an article.
My guess is that is the reason we're tortured with hours long videos with very little content.
My anecdotal data point: the homepage only seemed to have a video explanation, I dropped off right then because I didn't want to watch a 2 minute video about how this works.
When I search a page I'm looking for a description and a bit of context. You might be able to search a video thanks to autotranscripts. Then you have to scrub to be sure the keyword is in the correct context.
But we'll be sure to work on some video examples - I appreciate people learn in different ways. For a quick overview of Gomix, see https://gomix.com/about/
So yeah, I'd like a really robust tutorial (text, preferably, I don't like to sit and watch videos) which shows the creation of a full featured web app with persistent data storage, and a dynamic front end. Something with robust functionality so we can see how something like that is built.
https://gomix.com/help/faqs/
"We have a persistent file system, so anything you store within your project is kept. This means you can use files as a flat file database, or save your database files locally (see our SQLite3 and NeDB examples). You can also use third-party storage services, like a hosted MongoDB database or Redis (see our MongoDB example).
We recommend creating a folder called ‘.data’ as a safe place to store your database files. This folder isn’t copied across when a project is remixed."
I loved it when it was called Hyperdev too. At first I didn't really get it (I work at Stack Overflow so we're part of the same extended family meaning my first impression of Hyperdev was before it was as polished), honestly at first I was angry they were even spending the time doing something I considered so stupid. Until I had a use for it.
I had gotten a Raspberry Pi foundation touch-screen LCD, spent my Saturday morning setting it up, had a grandiose idea of what I wanted to make using it (basically just a "smart" note / TODO / grocery list manager I could attach to my fridge's door) and... realized I had to write yet-another-webapp. I've been making web apps for around a dozen years. The last thing I want to do in my life is spend the time writing the basics of a web-app.
My idea was going to be a thing where I'd use Trello (wow this is becoming an ad for all my sister companies remind me to plug FogBugz, Kiln, and CityDesk at some point too) as the "data store". I have Trello boards for everything. Work to-dos, Personal to-dos, even a trello list for the records I own and the records I want to own.
After writing the basics of what I wanted down, I started sketching the UI. And you know what? After I had all that set, I was able to make a prototype of the entire thing in less than 15 minutes using Gomix (at the time Hyperdev). You can view my prototype here: https://coal-sting.gomix.me/
I didn't end up building the full flow, but I've been coming back to the Gomix project every month or two and adding one-more-MVP-checklist-feature to my prototype. And once I'm done with it? I can take all the JS I wrote, put it into a project bundled with webpack like the rest of my projects, and place it directly onto my RPi and touchscreen.
I know Gomix looks deceptively simple, but that's exactly why I love it. I really value minimizing the time it takes to go from "ooh that's a cool idea" to "holy shit I'm actually working on the idea and not the cruft and skeleton code I need to work on before I get to work on the idea itself!"
Half the time the reason why I stop working on a side project is because I'm getting bored before I get to even work on the real side project. I am always just looking for an excuse to give up and go back to playing video games.
Gomix is perfect for me. I can't wait until they support more languages so I can throw away all the time I've spent and code I've written making templates[0] and bootstrappers[1] for myself.
[0] https://github.com/jc4p/flask-react-skeleton [1] https://github.com/jc4p/quickstart
> I love my FooBar 2001. I spent the past weekend migrating my dishwasher's contents into my new FooBar 2001 and it was a very pleasant experience. I was intimidated by how much work it would be at first but to my surprise it was A BREEZE. I'm so happy now with my new Foobar 2001 that I will probably use my dishwasher as a litterbox.
I just felt the need to comment because a lot of the comments remind me of my first impression of the product before I really gave it a chance.
I was so angry they were working on it, they started working on it after a quiet period following the Fog Creek / Trello split and my first impression was they were merely looking for something to waste their time doing, it just didn't make sense. But, I tried it, and damn I love it.
You can go look through my 5 years worth of HN comments if you'd like, when I like something I am always this excited about it.
Again, not questioning your ethics. Just trying help make your argument more impactful.
Honestly with the rest of this thread and the feedback though, I wish I hadn't posted it at all. I used to really enjoy participating in this community.
Happy new year.
I fully believe you had no ill intent. It's just that bending over backward to make it clear strengthens your viewpoint.
A few examples (among many) from his sterling career:
1. He was part of the SJW lynch mob, started by Gawker, that got Pax Dickinson (CTO of Business Insider) fired for out of context joking tweets Pax had written years prior.
2. He only retweets women on Twitter and has been quite explicit about it, dressing it up as 'fighting sexism.' I guess you fight sexism by adopting sexist policies? Kind of bizarre.
3. He coerced a journalist into changing a story to make himself look better: http://www.lorenfeldman.com/how-nick-bilton-compromised-hims...
As far as I can tell, Dash's only real skills are self-promotion and virtue signaling. From my moderate amount of research, I can't find any actual products he's released that have been successful or widely adopted. Good luck Fog Creek, you're gonna need it!
I used to really respect Joel Spolsky. I've read all of his stuff and really liked it.
But I can't help thinking that Fog Creek just isn't that important of a company. As a decidedly "technical" person, I don't know a single person that uses any of their products. And I really do mean, zero. I know plenty of people that use git, IntelliJ, github, Stack Overflow, Twilio, AWS, Firebase, Google Cloud Platform, MongoDB, Pivotal Tracker, hell even JIRA, but nothing from Fog Creek. Ten years in the trenches, writing software, and never have I even once used, or even _met_ anyone that uses their stuff.
Furthermore, the world has kinda moved on. We aren't shipping desktop software anymore and also, it's not enough to release to the web, either. These days people expect mobile apps, complex responsive design, and 1000 other things you didn't need to do 10 years ago. Software is increasingly becoming a field dominated by teams of specialists in all areas, and I just don't get the sense that Gomix was built with this new reality in mind.
Second. I first heard of this guy (Anil) only about a month ago, when I came upon Joel's blog. I heard that he became CEO and yeah, I agree with a lot of what you've written -- a windbag with a political agenda who's great at self-promotion. Honest question though, does this make for a great CEO? We can certainly look to really cerebral guys like Bill Gates as a model for a tech CEO, but consider that Jeff Bezos apparently wasn't a developer. Also consider that more problems in tech are basically "solved" at this point, and as the industry matures, things like promotion and marketing are getting increasingly important. Satya Nadella (Microsoft) himself acknowledged this; I just read last week that Microsoft had some kind of senior meeting, and Satya was on a rant about how MS's culture is too engineering-driven for today's world. I don't have the temperament to be as much of a self-promoter as a guy like Anil, but I know plenty of companies that seem to be run by these guys, like Buffer, Groove, or anyone else specializing in "content marketing", and it seems to be working for them.
So before you dismiss this guy, think of what it takes to make a good tech CEO. I fucking loathe self-promoters, really I do, but I'm becoming increasingly convinced that's what it takes to make it in the sort of CRUDdy "tech" that isn't too research-heavy, which is most of software, these days (not autonomous vehicles, genetics, deep learning, thorium reactors, etc)
Trello (project management) and Stack Overflow were spun off from Fog Creek parent company, but are not run by Fog Creek.
I would say, Fog Creek created one of the most important pieces of software in history and one of the most used. It is called "Stack Overflow". Sure. Quote how they are technically are not owned by FogCreek and Joel is just a CEO there. But that is lawyers, you know, lawyer-ing.
"In 2008, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky created Stack Overflow, a question-and-answer Web site for computer programming questions, which they described as an alternative to the programmer forum Experts-Exchange."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fog_Creek_Software#Stack_Overf...
After reading the rest of your post, I'm not sure why.
Joel Spolsky always seemed to me like he was all hat and no cattle -- he had rather strong opinions (and a high opinion of himself) for someone who ran a small company that never did anything of significance.
He has always seemed rather fixated on some kind of superiority complex and separating good programmers from bad, but why should anyone believe that he is one of the good ones? What is he an authority on -- writing software nobody wants to use?
(A good read, like most any one of his pieces - nothing wrong with his writing talent, obviously ...)
Before launching Amazon, Bezos worked at "a financial-trading company on the cutting edge of computer technology" [1].
Wikipedia says he has a degree in "electrical engineering and computer science" [2].
It's reasonable to assume that Bezos has at least some development experience.
[1] http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/biography/A-E/Bezos-Jeff...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos
http://www.lorenfeldman.com/anil-dash-is-a-coward-liar-and-b...
If this is true, and it seems true, no founder in Silicon Valley should do business or in any way support Anil Dash in anything.
I would chastise Joel Spolsky and that other guy too, but it seems unnecessary given the destruction they're inflicting on their own business by letting him run it. Hah.
From his own web site:
http://anildash.com/2013/09/my-meeting-with-pax.html
"He flat out said that he wants his startup to be funded and wasn't sure if it'd be possible after all of his, and I replied that it realistically wasn't going to happen without the say-so of someone like me, and I wasn't inclined to give some VC the nod on this. On reflection, I'll be explicit: If you're a venture capitalist, and you invest in Pax's startup without a profound, meaningful and years-long demonstration of responsibility from Pax beforehand, you're complicit in extending the tech industry's awful track record of exclusion, and it's unacceptable."
This is clearly a threat that Anil Dash will make trouble for any VC that funds him. This truly sounds so unethical that it might be criminal extortion.
I have no history or relationship with him. I just came across someone publicly trying to use his power against a fellow founder and I wanted to publicly (and anonymously) despise him for it.
> I hope that Pax's friends in the pick up artist community take a few moments away from writing date rape manuals and sending me death threats to reflect on the fact that their new hero has at least some tiny bit of respect for the wife he's been married to for 15 years. How crushed they will be.
> Pax showed up about 10 minutes late, having been busy with the latest stop on his press tour, and as I had agreed, I called him an asshole to his face and paid for his coffee. We talked for about 20 minutes. He offered up a pretty boringly conventional defense of male privilege, and when I described the role of actual satire and comedy in punching up instead of punching down, he revealed that he sees attacking feminists and equality activists as punching up. There was some pointless bickering from me about the inanity of that perspective, but overall things were fairly civil; I've met guys like this before and I didn't have any illusion that I was going to dissuade him from a perspective which his social group rewards with attention and the perverse impression that acting like an asshole is somehow being brave.
This is the new CEO of Fog Creek? In all fairness, he did say he was "fighting off a brutal chest cold". But WTF? I've had chest colds too, so has everyone. They never provoked me to being this nasty, whatever the reason.
I am sad. I thought Joel had some interesting insights, and Fog Creek was involved in some truly interesting and useful products like Stack Overflow and Trello.
But if someone like that is now running the show, it doesn't give me much hope for their future products.
Yeah, sounds exactly like the guy he is. I mean what else could someone be that thinks people who don't share his world-view are "supremacist assholes", that blacklisting others (or trying to blacklist them, whatever) is completely okay be than "trying to live a life where I am as unreasonably kind as I can be".
Kind of a messed up world when follower counts can have a chilling effect.
But if it's true what people say: No one wants to get into a public fight with a professional talker, SJW, "technologist" and self-promoter.
Those fights are only for people who have the time and the money.
"In The Passion Of The Christ 2, Jesus gets raped by a pack of niggers. It's his own fault for dressing like a whore though."
"aw, you can't feed your family on minimum wage? well who told you to start a fucking family when your skills are only worth minimum wage?"
"feminism in tech remains the champion topic for my block list. my finger is getting tired."
2. Not even sort of bizarre.
3. Anil reached out to a journalist and apparently made a valid point. The accusation of "coercion" has no basis in known facts. Your link is literally a guy quoting three tweets and making wild claims about what MIGHT have happened behind the scenes.
So this is what HN has deteriorated into? Really? Might want to check your blood pressure cause all that salt can't be good for you.
I think folks in tech (and society at large, frankly) have a bit of a fundamental misunderstanding of what comprises discrimination and sexism. The systematic disenfranchisement of a gender/race/ethnicity whatever term you want to use, often is not remedied without some kind of equality of status, that's what 'retweeting only women' is doing. Its giving equality of status to women that they likely would not usually have. Fundamentally I think its hard for a lot of folks to grasp this, even those who have historically been discriminated against when it comes to something they don't understand, part of that is human nature, but over and over again actual psychological studies and sociology studies show again and again that when you give people equality of status only then do things change. [0][1][2][3]
As far as Pax goes, CTO of a growing (and arguably large at the time even) should have known better, and frankly, his comments, joke or not, were inexcusable. I also don't care what people may say about what people say in private, because that is something I cannot react to, because I'm not party to that conversation, but this took place on a public forum, and it was in very poor taste at a minimum, and given an executive at a company, likely someone with such poor taste on a public forum as such I can't imagine was doing much for bettering workplace standards. This may be complete conjecture which I acknowledge. With that said, in my experience dealing with people who tend to act the same way in a public forum, in private they're more often than not just as inexcusable.
[0] http://commons.emich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1408&co... [1] http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-... [2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/ruchikatulshyan/2015/01/30/racia... [3] http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/02/10/business-...
Anil could have begged BI to forgive him and it wouldn't have helped. Pax placed a time bomb under his own bed with that tweet and it was destined to go off if BI ever found it.
In any case, it's cool that you're responding to a thread about your blog. I wish you and yours nothing but health and happiness in 2017 from here in Russia.
When you join a company a few weeks before it releases a new software product, have the humility to admit that you had precious little to do with it. Don't write about yourself, at all! Write about the product, what it can do for me, and the amazing team who built it.
I'm going to go way out of line and do a bit of a hatchet job on your writing, because this is honestly how it came across to me when I read your post. Here are your exact words, with a few ellipses thrown in to emphasize the point.
> I'M AT FOG CREEK…I’m the new CEO of Fog Creek Software!
> If you know me…It’s no secret that I’ve become increasingly critical of the conventional tech world’s lack of focus on ethics, humanity, and inclusion.
> [Fog Creek's] brilliant and thoughtful founders Michael and Joel were willing to trust me to be the CEO of the company that have so carefully shepherded all these years. [sic]
> …after challenges like shutting down ThinkUp earlier this year, I started reckoning a bit with how to be most effective in pushing the tech industry to be a little more thoughtful. This personal inflection point became clearer as the team at Activate released this year's Activate Outlook — seven years after we'd set out to create the leading strategy consulting company, I realized we'd not just succeeded, but done so to the degree where the team could now run effectively without me being involved day-to-day. Between stepping back to an advisory role at Activate and sharpening the focus of my work for the organizations whose boards I serve on, I was able to bring some clarity to the work in front of me.
> I realized that I wanted to fully engage myself with a single, all-encompassing role that would use all my skills, and that Fog Creek's legacy of leading the industry made it the perfect place to try and push things forward again. So now, I have a simple answer if someone at a cocktail party asks what I do.
> What do I do? I'm the CEO of a small software company in downtown Manhattan that’s as influential in the tech world as companies 1000 times our size.
> For the past several years, I found that the overhead of provisioning servers, or trying to maintain a dev environment, or wrangling with version control took all the fun out of coding for me, to the point where I don’t just hack on things for fun anymore. I can’t imagine how much more intimidating it would be if I hadn’t spent many years coding.
Tell me, does any of this have anything to do with… What was the product called again? What does it do for me? And how can you helpfully communicate that value?
Now I realize this post was on your personal blog. So a bit of self-indulgence is understandable. But still… Is all of this about you, or about a great company and its new product that you were lucky enough to be asked to be involved with?
I should admit that I'm probably just jealous. How in the world do you get a publication like TechCrunch to give you personal credit for this product when you had so little to do with it? Their headline from 12/6: "Anil Dash, new CEO of Fog Creek, launches platform to remove barriers to app development"
http://anildash.com/about.html
I don't know you, and you certainly don't know me, but I suspect Dash knows his target audience for this particular post pretty well. The product-focused posts are somewhere else, not his personal blog, and chances are they're gathering dust, speaking relatively and metaphorically.
Remember, the article was in fact meant to be about his new role. The title starts out "I'm at Fog Creek...". Given that he's within scope with what he wrote.
Personally, I would never list celebrities that have retweeted me and recoil at even the thought of doing such a thing. But we have to interpret things as generously as possible. I know people who would talk about Prince retweeting them just as a matter of fact thing that seemed cool to take note of.
I was out of line, and I am sorry for the harsh tone of my comments.
Doesn't look like there's currently any way to add more modules. At least I haven't found it yet. Interested in testing out the import feature...
Gomix is the easiest way to build the app or bot of your dreams.
With working example apps to remix, a code editor to modify them, instant hosting and deployment - anybody can build a web app on Gomix, for free.
Start by remixing. You never have to start from a blank slate. Remix a full, working app to personalize it for your needs, or build on the most popular and powerful developer frameworks to create your app.
Real collaboration. You don’t have to deal with the complexity of version control or tracking changes — the built-in editor allows multiple people to edit code at once and undo mistakes as they happen, just like working together in Google Docs.
It's not training wheels. Gomix is not a limited "toy" version of a real developer environment — your Gomix app is hosted on the exact same industry standard infrastructure that the best developers use to run their apps.
We handle the mess. While you work with Gomix, we seamlessly upgrade your servers and cloud infrastructure in the background. There’s no deployment or server provisioning because it all happens automatically.
Why Did We Make Gomix? In some ways, Gomix is a throwback to an older era of software or the internet, when there were simpler ways to get started making cool stuff. For people who were around at that time, they'll understand Gomix easily: We’re bringing “View Source” back. Of course, they didn't literally take “View Source” out of web browsers, but the ability to just look at the code behind something, and tweak it, and make your own thing, was essential to making the Internet fun, and weird, and diverse, in its early days. And that has sadly disappeared.
Similarly, in even earlier eras, tools like HyperCard on the Mac and Visual Basic on Windows democratized software creation, letting regular individuals or casual business users create useful apps to meet their needs. During development, Gomix was even called “HyperDev”, as a nod to this history — and its early-90s aesthetic subtly nods to that heritage, too.
Whether we look at simple issues like being able to do fun things with an Amazon Echo, or hugely complex issues like trying to make tech and programming more inclusive, Gomix has a role to play in solving problems that matter. And we’re going to have fun doing it!
1/4 of the article about culture and other guys and... I don't know what the hell it's talking about. I'm not even bothering reading half the sentence anymore.
1/4 Then it's talking about other unrelated products now? Outlook something.
> "Gomix brings back the fun of the “view source” web"
Oh finally. I had to re-read the article 3 times to find something about the new product, only at the end of the article!
Finished reading. Don't know what the product is about or what it's intended for.
Is it a AB testing software? Is it a a PageHacker[1] clone? Don't know.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/page-hacker/
How it works video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPc6dXBFhA4
1: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/05/31/introducing-hyperd...
I would have thought that would be more appropriate for software companies founded 40+ years ago — around longer than most careers