Show HN: I spent 2 years building Tablane as a 17-year-old (github.com)

Tiptap is listed as dependency, so it is almost certainly using Y.js as the CRDT provider.

As KRAKRISMOTT said, I am using TipTap with their HocusPocus backend!

> It uses the Sustainable Use License. I am not familiar with this though some googling shows several companies using it. Can you share what led you to choose it?

I mainly choose that one because of the incident with AWS offering ElasticSearch as a Service without their approval

I want something basically Opensource, where Individuals or Companies can use it freely for their own purpose BUT limtit companies from starting a competitor to Tablane Cloud from my own work.

> Minor nitpick: your readme says "First, rename .env.example to .env." but I didn't see anything in the readme referring to "env".

I forgot to add a .env.example file in the tablane-api repo. Going to fix that!

> There are a few dialogs that don't seem to support keyboard controls (like Enter), I've opened a PR for this.

Thanks, I am going to check that!

> When I try and run it locally to test my PR, it seems to complain with an "AppError: Invalid access token" on the backend. I get a "Something went wrong" error message (and the XHR fails with a CORS error). What am I doing wrong?

I forgot to add the .env.example file to the tablane-api repo: https://github.com/Tablane/tablane-api/commit/6c92035505914d...

Unless there are strong reasons not to do college, I would recommend to not skip it.

Disclaimer: I am talking about OP's situation specifically. I am not trying to make a general "everyone should go to college unless they have a strong reason not to" statement, because I don't agree with it myself.

100% agree. Great advice. I never went to University, in my case for reasons that I prefer not to mention and it has been a constant source of regret. I wish I had a time machine.

I would say, for me, it actually would have been good to spend a few years working in industry to get a view of what real world programming is like and gain some awareness of what doors might be closed to you without a degree.

In this situation I would recommend being careful to not become dependent on the level of income that most software development provides. If you are cautious with your finances, you could decide to go for the degree with some money saved up as opposed to it feeling like a major financial hurdle to leave your job in order to go to school full time.

I agree that the computer science knowledge, even some of the deeply theoretical stuff, is heavily underrated. Classes like OS, networks, programming languages and compilers, and computation theory have taught me stuff I use in actual software development. Plus, learning how to look up stuff and understand research papers and take measurements and form experiments (you will need to read heavy documentation and measure things in industry).

Without knowing the fundamentals of CS like data structures you may miss out some concepts and end up doing things inefficiently (in both development effort and inefficient programs). Webdev alone won’t get you that knowledge.

As for the “college experience” personally I disagree. I’m of the camp (as an American) that it’s mostly a glorified American thing. As long as you have some friends, who you can find in college or industry or your local town (if you don’t move), you are set, and you’re not missing much (as having some friends and hanging out basically is the college experience).

But also, as someone who went through college I think it greatly helps to have experience in industry. Because while you miss out on purely industry, you also miss out on purely academia (cue: academics who are wildly out-of-touch, papers on deep theoretical concepts I doubt will have any real-world use). It also really helps with finances (read: not going into college debt) and "getting your foot in the game" and making connections early is extremely useful as it will let you graduate with experience on your resume and skip entry-level jobs. I think that the best solution is both, hence join an internship-focused college or take college classes and maybe lab work while doing an internship

So if you already have many job offers (1) (you can negotiate a good salary) and already have a GF (2) reason 1 and 2 is already covered and thus you don't need uni/college.

College doesn't go away, it can wait.

I ended up starting to work in software for cash before I finished high school, and I'm still a dev that loves the stuff, 13 years later. Makes me happy to see so many people with a similar story.

That said, I did eventually go to college and I don't regret a thing. I met so many people, and did so many things I wouldn't have done otherwise, and it made me a better professional. The corporate world can be very oppressing and unforgiving. I wouldn't miss university, having the chance, and you can still freelance while you're there too!

If you want to be real good at inverting a binary tree and get a FAANG job ASAP, choose the academic route. If you love programming and want to get better at it with real world experience, get a job. You will have the rest of your life to learn about inverting binary trees if you really need to. 100% of what you will learn is available online, often for free.

Don't underestimate the effect of starting your career at 18 instead of 25. I'd rather hire the one with most experience.

I used to work half days and whole days whenever my schedule would allow.

But if you can, I think it’s the safest decision to go.

People in this thread give a bunch of reasons, which I challenge:

1. Immigration: I’m 25 from a shithole country. I have lived and worked in Asia, Europe and America. A bit more difficulty, but nothing major. Surely with a German passport this wouldn’t be a biggie.

2. Learning: Admittedly, the internet has a lot of noise. But there are good resources like MIT OCW, teachyourselfcs, etc. I will argue some universities are worst than some of the online resources.

3. Social connection: This wouldn’t be a problem if you have hobbies, community and a life outside work. You can always make life long friends.

4. You will learn or experience something vague: Please be specific? Usually, there are other ways to learn or experience these things.

The biggest issue I had to deal with was I thought all the college folks were better than me. But that went away when I joined bigger companies and started interviewing and working with college folks. They were not special.

The private beta is refering to the versions before v0.1, when there wasn't a publicly hosted version.

Pick from the Essentials column list and add "People" to the task list. Then pick yourself. It'll show up on the homepage.

The screenshots seem more "complete". so either I'm missing something or I just don't have access to a lot of the "beta" features.

Here are some examples: https://imgur.com/a/5EL2LJq

That sounds like a terrible idea, to be fair. (And you don't mean University of Waterloo in Canada?). Isn't University free in Germany?

> mainly because their presented curriculum where basic js, css, html, react, easy leetcode algorithms

Maybe, but are you sure they aren't teaching engineering ethics, digital logic, discrete algebra, calculus, and a lot of other things too?

Additionally, you will never again get the chance to be 18-22 and around a whole bunch of 18-22 year-olds again. It will never be easier in your life to make friends. You have your whole life to be programming. Don't make the same mistake I made. Live it up. Study abroad. Go on spring break with friends.

Take a look at the course list, pick one that sound interesting and just go there for a day or two in a big hörsaal, no one will care about you. Vorlesungen are boring but it will give you insights on the topics you will study there.

In most courses no one will care whether you go there or not, just do it at home and quicker.

You won‘t need all of that but it will give you a strong foundation for whatever the future holds.

If you want to work look for part time positions and study on the side. It‘s easy because the cost is only €600/year and includes public transport.

The degree will help you everywhere: immigration, getting past hr, getting jobs that go beyond web dev etc.

That said there are ways to get those qualifications at your own pace and much cheaper. Find a way to speed run a degree. It'll be worth it.

If you have any interest in other fields, such as communication, I.R., psychology, or economics, they'd be helpful I think. And you can clear out those pesky migrate-with-bachelors visa requirements people have mentioned.

There are also correspondence college courses (traditional MOOC equivalent), but yeah, it's not really a substitute for undergraduate life.

Big players such as Google offer software engineering apprenticeships targeted at people interested in tech but without formal CS degrees. They're a great way to learn, do real work and rotate around different teams.

Go work for as long as you think it's rewarding, and maybe in a few years you might want to go to university and then you can easily work part time as a freelancer. You'll be one of the few students who don't have to worry about money.

Anyway, do whatever motivates you the most right now!

If you're interested in working in Berlin, send me message, I might be able to give you some recommendations and/or contacts depending on what you want to do.

As for why I went to college; I made that decision because I didn't really know what I wanted to do or where I was headed and I wasn't experienced at all in programming or any CS related topics.

The main benefit for me was being in an environment where I was introduced to new CS topics/ideas. As for having a deep understanding of those topics and how to implement them, I had to self study/teach myself.

My point is, is that you shouldn't feel pressured to do anything. You need to make a decision that works best for you because the value of uni/college is, and will be, different for everyone. :)

You’ll quickly reach a point where YouTube and Google won’t easily do, and only genuine and deep work will. That’s when rewarding, lasting impressions will happen (which superficial topics like HTML or the latest JS framework aren’t!). It shouldn’t be like just another frontend boot camp, just longer. Challenge yourself and reap the benefits forever. That and campus life in general of course…

I'm almost the same age as you.

I work full time with university (both remote and in separate timezone). There are partial remote options for CS which didn't exist before pandemic. You may only need to attend for semester and in-between exams in person and rest you can run it on your own pace.

I don't spend much time on university since there is no mandatory lecture or attendance. I know a lot of the course work already so I can do fine on submissions, exams, etc without having to attend remote lectures and watching videos.

It can be tough especially with maths and there is no campus lifestyle.

Daily meeting is with people in 40s instead of 18-20 year olds but I love that, some may not.

I only need the degree and some formal framework so I'm not super picky about the university ranking. Most options available are not "elite" so that's something to consider.

They are also paid out of pocket unlike germany where university is free. It can be expensive but since I work, I don't have to worry about it.

You need to watch out for accreditation. There are few authorities in each countries with specific rules with regards to whether the degree will be recognized if done part time or partially remote.

You can also get an equivalence certificate for immigration purposes.

The trade offs made sense for me. It may not for you or someone else. I'm happy with my current position.

Feel free to email me (in the profile) if you want to discuss or learn more. Throwaway for privacy reasons.

One piece of advice - you should do some research on US/Canadian immigration policies and how a college degree affects (or doesn’t affect) your ability to immigrate. This is something that may not be top of mind for you, but if your goal is to move to the US it’s a very important factor to consider.

- The whole js, css, html, react stuff sounds more like a beginner web dev bootcamp that should last a few months rather than a 3-4 year CS degree. Avoid that.

- Sometimes YouTube is great. E.g., a playlist from a Cambridge lecturer [5] was immensely more valuable than the live lectures I was being delivered alongside 200+ other students. I don't think lectures are efficient but I typically have a mix of lectures + labs + coursework and now, a substantial individual project supervised by a researcher. I'm excited for the future of edtech and programs like OSSU [6] are great if the focus is purely on absorbing CS content but its limited. Something else I found is that the modules I dreaded the most and certainly wouldn't have opted into had they been optional were the ones I learned the most from. Who knew that an Interaction Design class would be so relevant for doing customer discovery in a startup.

- No doubt that you can also have an income while studying.

- Pick up an internship to learn from experienced software engineers.

- The life experience is something I'll miss dearly, be it sports, socialising, dipping into the startup culture (We have an on campus accelerator).

- I stress more about turning down jobs than worrying about not having one.

If you have access to a quality CS degree that doesn't cost you a kidney then go for it.

[1] https://github.com/Cheon-App/planner [2] https://reflection.app [3] https://the-ciru.com [4] https://medium.com/wise-engineering/wise-engineering-interns... [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEAMfLPZZhE&list=PLeKd45zvjc... [6] https://github.com/ossu/computer-science

This is invaluable as time will start slipping in front of you faster and faster, and soon you won't have time anymore to experiment and try new things.

As a general advice, I'd tell you to give college a try, and apply to something that is only tangentially close to coding. Keep working on your startup and keep improving your CS skills as you have been doing, and in College try new things. Whether you want to be a coder or an entrepreneur, you'll require many different skills. A diverse study plan that includes a bit of different subjects (economics, law and alikes) can be very useful.

Think of what you have achieved in only 17 years, and then try to picture where you'll be in another 20. And what the world will look like in 20 years. Your most valuable asset is and will be your brain, so the most you can develop it, the better.

Disclaimer: I'm a University professor

If what you’re good at is a marketable skill (mine wasn’t) then all the better.

Also, probably not the best advice.