16 ms·

I'm at Fog Creek, and we're introducing Gomix

269 points by prawn 10y ago

jszymborski 10y ago
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.
- jc4p 10y ago
  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 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. [0] http://anildash.com/2012/12/the-web-we-lost.html http://anildash.com/2012/12/the-web-we-lost.html
- ProAm 10y ago
  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...
  - carbocation 10y ago
    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."
- kowdermeister 10y ago
  What's wrong with being centralized? It's just a prototyping platform. I doubt anyone would build a production app on this. I recently used it to play with websockets and being centralized was the main reason it worked so well.
  - arkitaip 10y ago
    I was hoping it would be for production apps...
  - pdkl95 10y ago
    In software, unfortunately, the prototype often is the production app.
  - svantana 10y ago
    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.
    - deleted 10y ago
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  - mstade 10y ago
    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.
- anildash 10y ago
  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.
- WhitneyLand 10y ago
  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.
- adamryman 10y ago
  This comment made me laugh a lot. So I made this: http://i.imgur.com/OJ3ZgDD.jpg http://i.imgur.com/OJ3ZgDD.jpg
techbubble 10y ago
This looks like a slightly upgraded Mozilla Thimble https://thimble.mozilla.org https://thimble.mozilla.org
- gkoberger 10y ago
  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. Source: https://learning.mozilla.org/blog/introducing-the-new-thimble-an-educational-code-editor-for-teaching-and-learning-the-web https://learning.mozilla.org/blog/introducing-the-new-thimbl... and https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/05/31/introducing-hyperdev/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/05/31/introducing-hyperd...
  - asdfasdfa11112 10y ago
    So its a process I need to adapt several of my dev teams to adopt? We just got in a new agile rhythmn.
  - patates 10y ago
    I still didn't understand how they replace version control for the sake of something better. AFAICT, it just lacks version control?
    - facorreia 10y ago
      Lack of version control is a deal breaker for me to just go through the trouble of opening their page and clicking on "Try". Maybe there will be Kiln integration at some point?
mrtimo 10y ago
I found this post with examples of things recently built with gomix quite illustrative: https://medium.com/gomix/what-can-you-build-on-gomix-557e38003f4e#.pbbi7291b https://medium.com/gomix/what-can-you-build-on-gomix-557e380...
prawn 10y ago
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. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/06/anil-dash-is-the-new-ceo-of-fog-creek-software/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/06/anil-dash-is-the-n...
jph 10y ago
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.
- im2nguyen 10y ago
  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'.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - anildash 10y ago
    Yep! We're doing exactly this — hope you'll give it a try. :)
ransom1538 10y ago
First Joel is brilliant. I love the idea. However, "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" 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).
- tezza 10y ago
  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
  - Nullabillity 10y ago
    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.
- tim333 10y ago
  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.
vortico 10y ago
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?
- aerovistae 10y ago
  That doesn't get in your way for finding jobs?
  - anamoulous 10y ago
    Some folks are fortunate enough to only have to deal with frontend technology in their spare time.
  - vortico 10y ago
    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.
- JofArnold 10y ago
  I don't know the answer, but whoever down voted OP is an ass. Its a perfectly reasonable question. So what if OPs skills are different to yours.
- gkoberger 10y ago
  I don't see why they wouldn't be supported. It's just a regular Node/Express app, so you can include whatever modules you need.
  - vortico 10y ago
    Looks like you're right, and syntax highlighting is even supported!
- GarethX 10y ago
  It does - here's an example using Jade (Pug), Stylus and Coffeescript: https://gomix.com/#!/project/hello-coffee https://gomix.com/#!/project/hello-coffee 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 https://gomix.com/#!/project/community
graphememes 10y ago
Looks horrible, still don't know what it's for.
- known 10y ago
  https://gomix.com/help/faqs/ https://gomix.com/help/faqs/
- astrodust 10y ago
  It's like http://codepad.org http://codepad.org or http://jsfiddle.net http://jsfiddle.net but with persistence and GitHub integration, project support, and live collaborative editing.
- systems 10y ago
  the video is not technical enough, to explain "what is this" to the technical people who dont have any experience with this application domain 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
- codecamper 10y ago
  seems like they solved the easy parts of programming.
alooPotato 10y ago
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...
- GarethX 10y ago
  We'll be adding some type of super simple 'branching' type functionality allowing people to develop without breaking production.
  - alooPotato 10y ago
    Is that happening soonish?
    - anildash 10y ago
      Yes-ish. :)
jedmeyers 10y ago
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.
- codecamper 10y ago
  oops!
- camus2 10y ago
  > offensive word for homosexual people - 'gomik's Could be worse, imagine a product named Gopnik /s
  - eps 10y ago
    No, that would've not been worse.
- minikomi 10y ago
  Sounds kind of like ゴミ (Gomi) too -- trash in Japanese.
- anildash 10y ago
  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.
deleted 10y ago
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mistermann 10y ago
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.
- smikhanov 10y ago
  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.
  - BinaryIdiot 10y ago
    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.
  - kpil 10y ago
    I have noticed that a lot of young people have never learned to read fast or skim large documents. My guess is that is the reason we're tortured with hours long videos with very little content.
    - chadcmulligan 10y ago
      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.
    - stevenleeg 10y ago
      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.
mrsmee89 10y ago
Is there a datastore of some kind?
- kimsk112 10y ago
  They do provide persistent file system. https://gomix.com/help/faqs/ 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."
  - mrsmee89 10y ago
    Thank you. Seems kind of cumbersome though. Why wouldn't they provide one themselves.
    - GarethX 10y ago
      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.
jc4p 10y ago
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/ 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 https://github.com/jc4p/flask-react-skeleton [1] https://github.com/jc4p/quickstart https://github.com/jc4p/quickstart
throwaway-17733 10y ago
How many times can this blowhard say "I'm the CEO" in one blog post? He & his CEOness are not the story here.
- osium598 10y ago
  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. 3. He coerced a journalist into changing a story to make himself look better: http://www.lorenfeldman.com/how-nick-bilton-compromised-himself-and-the-ny-times-for-anil-dash/ 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!
  - eldavido 10y ago
    So, two things. 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)
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lovehashbrowns 10y ago
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.
- GarethX 10y ago
  ah cool - if you're new to Node.js, then be sure to check out our free interactive course: https://gomix.com/#!/project/node-beginner https://gomix.com/#!/project/node-beginner
spraak 10y ago
Just use Zeit's 'now'
cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
Why is a post about a product launch that was made a month ago #1 on HN right now? Did something happen?
- mjolk 10y ago
  Someone pushing their social network to come here and upvote.
  - anildash 10y ago
    Nah, if we'd have done that it certainly wouldn't have been while I was asleep and over a major holiday.
    - mjolk 10y ago
      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.
Stratoscope 10y ago
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"
kaosjester 10y ago
I read the blog post and I still have no idea what Gomix is. Is it just a web-based nodejs ide?
- GarethX 10y ago
  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/ https://gomix.com/about/
- rickyc091 10y ago
  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...
abbot2 10y ago
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...
- GarethX 10y ago
  Here you go: https://gomix.com/about/ https://gomix.com/about/
  - abbot2 10y ago
    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.
    - GarethX 10y ago
      Here's the text of the page for you: 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!
user5994461 10y ago
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. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/page-hacker/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/page-hacker/
- arkitaip 10y ago
  "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." How it works video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPc6dXBFhA4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPc6dXBFhA4
- frozenport 10y ago
  I think we need to replace the link with the actual product release.
- te_chris 10y ago
  Yawn. Does this genre of comment have to be top of every thread?
  - nzjrs 10y ago
    It's warranted in this case as it's responding to the worst launch post I can recall reading.
    - hashhar 10y ago
      This is actually not the launch post. This is the launch post [1]. 1: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/05/31/introducing-hyperdev/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/05/31/introducing-hyperd...
pacaro 10y ago
Is a software company founded in 2000 really "venerable"? I would have thought that would be more appropriate for software companies founded 40+ years ago — around longer than most careers
- kowdermeister 10y ago
  It's not the length of operation, but the track record.
brylie 10y ago
Will Gomix be open source?
- anildash 10y ago
  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.
EugeneOZ 10y ago
One more tool for managers and non-tech product owners, to sell them idea "any cool app can be made just by few clicks of mouse, your dreams will come true, developers are lying about complexity". And in reality all of these "just copy-paste from github" will require tons of work to integrate, because in reality 3 party plugins are not so carefully prepared for Gomix as in their video presentation.
- ayanray 10y ago
  As an aside, does anyone have a list of tools that are in this category of "One more tool for managers and non-tech product owners, to sell them idea \"any cool app can be made just by few clicks of mouse, your dreams will come true\"". What's a good place to find such tools?
  - EugeneOZ 10y ago
    Even if you are trolling, good example of such products: PHPMaker. I hate it wholeheartedly as a programmer, but if you like tools like this - you will be satisfied :)
redsummer 10y ago
Anil Dash seems like a deeply creepy guy. He inserts race into everything: https://twitter.com/marcoarment/status/336853407698657280 https://twitter.com/marcoarment/status/336853407698657280 He gets people fired for making jokes: http://archive.is/ddDFz http://archive.is/ddDFz I'm sure Gomix will have some level of success, though I have no idea what it is from his post - which just seems to be about how his is now CEO and all the glory is his. I wonder how his team feel about that? Perhaps some of them are white, so the team doesn't matter?
- janwillemb 10y ago
  One tweet != everything
  - BipolarElsa 10y ago
    classic brown-bashing
- mmjaa 10y ago
  I think Anil Dash is a creep. His involvement in Gomix and Fog Creek means I'm less interested in those projects, frankly. I think he's one of the bigger blowhards in this scene, and I don't see the value in his participation, given that he seems more interested in social engineering his way to the top than .. you know .. actual engineering.
  - redsummer 10y ago
    Judging from the lack of clarity in his post, he doesn't seem to know what his own product is. But he sure knows that he is the new CEO (he mentions it a few times). And he certainly thinks the successes of Fog Creek somehow reflect on him - in fact he talks about that more than the product.
    - yitchelle 10y ago
      For me, it is a bad sign when the personalities in the company has a higher profile than the products it is selling/making. Fog Creek seems to be heading down this path.
deleted 10y ago
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benjaminjosephw 10y ago
Gomix looks like the most ideal tool for hackathons where multiple people can really quickly collaborate on a live updating prototype. It also seems like a fantastic tool for teaching since learners have a really tight feedback loop without any set-up. Obviously, most of us here aren't the real audience for this but I can see it really lowering the barrier of entry for a lot of people.
huhtenberg 10y ago
In Russian "Gomik" is an intentionally offensive, very rude form of "homosexual". Just FYI, Fog Creek.
deleted 10y ago
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mdekkers 10y ago
After reading that, I don't think I'd want to work at Fog Creek.
chvid 10y ago
This mostly seems to be about a new CEO at Fog Creek. I have never heard of him but appearantly he has a big following. And it appears that a very large number of people don't like him - enough to create a bunch of new accounts here at HN just to comment on his persona. Fog Creek has to me always been about Joel on Software. And to me they always got a lot of credit and extra attention to their products because of his excellent writing. It must be hard for a new CEO to follow up on that. As for the product; it has already been announced and discussed here earlier. Personally I fail to see what it adds to an already crowded space of online, web-based, collaborative development environments. Honestly I think has too few features and is kinda ugly. But given that Trello and Stack Overflow has very large user bases maybe it is able to push thru and gain critical mass.
- WhitneyLand 10y ago
  >I fail to see what it adds to an already crowded space Can you give an example? I'm not aware of many products that are attacking the problem of making coding easier and more fun in the same way they are.
  - jeremiep 10y ago
    Countless people have tried to make programming "easier" and "more fun". It usually ends up into wishful thinking and lots of sentences with "awesome" and other words without any meaning in them. I'd rather make coding simpler than easier. The fun will naturally emerge out of using simpler constructs. This is exactly what Clojure did for me :) I tried many tools with Java/C#/C++/JavaScript/Ruby and whatnot and while they can be useful, they're not to the point of making code actually easier or fun in these languages - at least not nearly enough for all the learning they require you to do.
    - WhitneyLand 10y ago
      Oh yes I'm aware many have tried and most have failed. But that's why I'm glad to see another go at it. I'm convinced it's possible to strike a balance in designing such a product that catches on like wildfire. I think what they have is a decent start but could be a lot better. Maybe I'll share some of my own ideas if they are open to that kind of feedback.
olegp 10y ago
This is very similar to Akshell (http://toughbyte.com/akshell/ http://toughbyte.com/akshell/) which we worked on more than six years ago with @korenyushkin and that made the front page of HN on a number of occasions. Despite being promoted by Fog Creek, I suspect that Gomix will run into the same problem that we did: professional developers won't use it as they already have the tools they prefer, whereas hobbyists won't be willing to pay. Without a viable business model, a service like this won't grow. I hope I'm wrong though! AppJet, a similar service from a YC team (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppJet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppJet) was the reason I got into JavaScript. PS. If you're looking for something similar, but simpler and geared towards backend apps and micro services (think AWS Lambda), you should check out https://unitcluster.com/ https://unitcluster.com/
- irq-1 10y ago
  Don't people who are starting out find these systems to be too difficult? You have to know much more to use this, then the "view source" days: Http codes/headers, javascript, npm?, css... Those weren't things you dealt with when changing Html on your local browser. I'm sure I don't have a good perspective on what new coders can handle, but this seems like too much.
  - olegp 10y ago
    Good point. AppJet and Akshell had their own built in libraries and guides, whereas with Gomix you're expected to already know about Node, NPM and figure out which libraries to use yourself. This is likely to make this too complex for people just starting out, making the model even less viable. On a somewhat related note, one thing I'd like to see is cheap Heroku like hosting for Node. Most Node web apps could get by with 64MB of memory and processes could be started quickly in response to incoming requests, making it possible to price this at 1 USD per app per month.
    - jacques_chester 10y ago
      Pivotal Web Services[0] uses Cloud Foundry, allowing you to specify any instance size you want, to the megabyte. (The pricing page[1] is deliberately simplified, but you really can specify to the megabyte what you want). [0] http://run.pivotal.io/ http://run.pivotal.io/ [1] http://run.pivotal.io/pricing/ http://run.pivotal.io/pricing/ Disclosure: I work for Pivotal.
scoot 10y ago
This seems like a slightly more balanced blog post (posted to HN a few weeks ago): https://medium.com/gomix/introducing-gomix-aec205c421cb#.jcdijcso1 https://medium.com/gomix/introducing-gomix-aec205c421cb#.jcd... Also discussed on this Show HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13116426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13116426
jimnotgym 10y ago
I am waiting for Fog reek to write something as good as Trello, and I'm not sure this is it. Trello is a genius piece of clear thinking, and is loved by non tech people, but has a 'power user' features and a decent API. I'm not sure about this Gomix thing. I might send my kids to have a play on it and see what they think. I can't imagine it is going to have the uptake of Trello though
throwaway274739 10y ago
Don't mean to be a wet blanket... but "Gomix" sounds/looks a lot like the Russian word for "faggot".
joelcollinsdc 10y ago
Saw this on medium and got excited. Checked for commentary on HN, and found Gomix was posted to HN 4 times with little fanfare (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=gomix.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=gomix.com). Now when a tech celebrity posts about it, the post blows up but is filled with discussion of the personality...
- anildash 10y ago
  I wrote this post the same day as the rest of the announcements; I don't know why my personal blog post took off now, but I'd definitely prefer to focus on the product, not me.
  - eldavido 10y ago
    Anil - not sure you're still reading here but the civility with which you've handled a lot of criticism really impresses me.
    - anildash 10y ago
      Heh, thanks. I've been on the internet long enough to know most of what folks are going to fuss about on HN probably doesn't have much to actually do with me as a person.
facorreia 10y ago
> to stop coding from being an exclusionary priesthood for a small few Are there really people that see it that way? For me it's just the opposite, programming is a field that is easily accessible to anyone that's interested, with a very low entry bar. Since I learned to program when I was a teenager, by reading a book about the BASIC language and taking an introductory class where I could use a microcomputer, I have a hard time thinking about it as "an exclusionary priesthood for a small few".
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  >>programming is a field that is easily accessible to anyone that's interested, with a very low entry bar. Not according to the hordes of HN posters who regularly shit on coding bootcamps.
  - no_wizard 10y ago
    Perhaps coding boot camps are the problem, and not the accessibility of learning to program? Not that I'm arguing bootcamps are bad, however there is a lot of junk out there. * with that said General Assembly I hear is pretty good, and there is a reason why a lot of companies let their employees go to some of their Bootcamps. The rest, I can't speak for, even on a incidental level.
- blakeyrat 10y ago
  I see it that way. That attitude used to exist back in the 90s, with products like HyperCard, Filemaker, even Microsoft Access. There was a time when it was just expected that development software had a graphical interface builder for developers to use. (Heck, even IDEs for really difficult languages, like C++, had them.) But "real developers" crapped all over those tools, especially Access. And when "real developers" create programming tools, they don't spend even 10 milliseconds thinking about accessibility or usability or user experience-- look at Git (created in 2005) as a perfect example. There was a time when terrible software like Git was mocked and derided, not praised. So while back in 1998, anybody could program their own recipe database with drag&drop and a little scripting in HyperCard or Access, now in 2016 they can't. They could try perhaps in one of the "leftover" easy environments, like WinForms, but it's about an order of magnitude more difficult to learn, and if they want to share their solution with someone, they have to learn Git which is about two orders of magnitude more difficult to learn. The world you grew up in no longer exists, and we move further from that ideal every year. Sorry, but the "high priesthood" concept (make everything difficult and annoying so we can demand more salary) won in our industry, and it won decades ago.
mrits 10y ago
After reading the blog and comments on here I now have a really bad impression of Fog Creek's CEO and little hope for their future.
tomc1985 10y ago
It's a little odd to read a "programming is just so gosh darn hard" sales pitch from Fog Creek.
- anildash 10y ago
  That might be my fault if I wrote this poorly. What I was trying to say was closer to "programming is fun, but all the prerequisites it takes to get code running these days aren't very satisfying".
dpweb 10y ago
I like this alot. For brainstorming and trying out quick ideas, its a really fast way to prototype server side code, even without the remix/social features. I'll explain why I think this product is important. Everyone knows the js dev world has fallen vicrim to the irresistable urge to abstract away and you end up with toolchain on top of toolchain. Node and express made it possible to get an app going instantly, but now, not so instant cause you have this that and the other to install and more importantly learn how to use. For example, since Stackoverflow was mentioned, take a look there at how many people are stuck, not on js, they're confused by Angular or whatever framework was supposed to make their life easier. Simpler frameworks and simpler ways are usually pretty well received, so I view gomix as being in that spirit. Congrats to the makers its an interesting tool.

269 points by prawn 10y ago

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.

jc4p 10y ago
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 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. [0] http://anildash.com/2012/12/the-web-we-lost.html http://anildash.com/2012/12/the-web-we-lost.html
ProAm 10y ago
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...
- carbocation 10y ago
  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."
kowdermeister 10y ago
What's wrong with being centralized? It's just a prototyping platform. I doubt anyone would build a production app on this. I recently used it to play with websockets and being centralized was the main reason it worked so well.
- arkitaip 10y ago
  I was hoping it would be for production apps...
- pdkl95 10y ago
  In software, unfortunately, the prototype often is the production app.
- svantana 10y ago
  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.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- mstade 10y ago
  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.
anildash 10y ago
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.
WhitneyLand 10y ago
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.
adamryman 10y ago
This comment made me laugh a lot. So I made this: http://i.imgur.com/OJ3ZgDD.jpg http://i.imgur.com/OJ3ZgDD.jpg

techbubble 10y ago

This looks like a slightly upgraded Mozilla Thimble https://thimble.mozilla.org https://thimble.mozilla.org

gkoberger 10y ago
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. Source: https://learning.mozilla.org/blog/introducing-the-new-thimble-an-educational-code-editor-for-teaching-and-learning-the-web https://learning.mozilla.org/blog/introducing-the-new-thimbl... and https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/05/31/introducing-hyperdev/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/05/31/introducing-hyperd...
- asdfasdfa11112 10y ago
  So its a process I need to adapt several of my dev teams to adopt? We just got in a new agile rhythmn.
- patates 10y ago
  I still didn't understand how they replace version control for the sake of something better. AFAICT, it just lacks version control?
  - facorreia 10y ago
    Lack of version control is a deal breaker for me to just go through the trouble of opening their page and clicking on "Try". Maybe there will be Kiln integration at some point?

mrtimo 10y ago

I found this post with examples of things recently built with gomix quite illustrative: https://medium.com/gomix/what-can-you-build-on-gomix-557e38003f4e#.pbbi7291b https://medium.com/gomix/what-can-you-build-on-gomix-557e380...

prawn 10y ago

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. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/06/anil-dash-is-the-new-ceo-of-fog-creek-software/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/06/anil-dash-is-the-n...

jph 10y ago

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.

im2nguyen 10y ago
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'.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- anildash 10y ago
  Yep! We're doing exactly this — hope you'll give it a try. :)

ransom1538 10y ago

First Joel is brilliant. I love the idea. However, "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" 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).

tezza 10y ago
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
- Nullabillity 10y ago
  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.
tim333 10y ago
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.

vortico 10y ago

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?

aerovistae 10y ago
That doesn't get in your way for finding jobs?
- anamoulous 10y ago
  Some folks are fortunate enough to only have to deal with frontend technology in their spare time.
- vortico 10y ago
  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.
JofArnold 10y ago
I don't know the answer, but whoever down voted OP is an ass. Its a perfectly reasonable question. So what if OPs skills are different to yours.
gkoberger 10y ago
I don't see why they wouldn't be supported. It's just a regular Node/Express app, so you can include whatever modules you need.
- vortico 10y ago
  Looks like you're right, and syntax highlighting is even supported!
GarethX 10y ago
It does - here's an example using Jade (Pug), Stylus and Coffeescript: https://gomix.com/#!/project/hello-coffee https://gomix.com/#!/project/hello-coffee 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 https://gomix.com/#!/project/community

graphememes 10y ago

Looks horrible, still don't know what it's for.

known 10y ago
https://gomix.com/help/faqs/ https://gomix.com/help/faqs/
astrodust 10y ago
It's like http://codepad.org http://codepad.org or http://jsfiddle.net http://jsfiddle.net but with persistence and GitHub integration, project support, and live collaborative editing.
systems 10y ago
the video is not technical enough, to explain "what is this" to the technical people who dont have any experience with this application domain 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
codecamper 10y ago
seems like they solved the easy parts of programming.

alooPotato 10y ago

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...

GarethX 10y ago
We'll be adding some type of super simple 'branching' type functionality allowing people to develop without breaking production.
- alooPotato 10y ago
  Is that happening soonish?
  - anildash 10y ago
    Yes-ish. :)

jedmeyers 10y ago

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.

codecamper 10y ago
oops!
camus2 10y ago
> offensive word for homosexual people - 'gomik's Could be worse, imagine a product named Gopnik /s
- eps 10y ago
  No, that would've not been worse.
minikomi 10y ago
Sounds kind of like ゴミ (Gomi) too -- trash in Japanese.
anildash 10y ago
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.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

mistermann 10y ago

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.

smikhanov 10y ago
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.
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  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.
- kpil 10y ago
  I have noticed that a lot of young people have never learned to read fast or skim large documents. My guess is that is the reason we're tortured with hours long videos with very little content.
  - chadcmulligan 10y ago
    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.
  - stevenleeg 10y ago
    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.

mrsmee89 10y ago

Is there a datastore of some kind?

kimsk112 10y ago
They do provide persistent file system. https://gomix.com/help/faqs/ 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."
- mrsmee89 10y ago
  Thank you. Seems kind of cumbersome though. Why wouldn't they provide one themselves.
  - GarethX 10y ago
    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.

jc4p 10y ago

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/ 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 https://github.com/jc4p/flask-react-skeleton [1] https://github.com/jc4p/quickstart https://github.com/jc4p/quickstart

throwaway-17733 10y ago

How many times can this blowhard say "I'm the CEO" in one blog post? He & his CEOness are not the story here.

osium598 10y ago
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. 3. He coerced a journalist into changing a story to make himself look better: http://www.lorenfeldman.com/how-nick-bilton-compromised-himself-and-the-ny-times-for-anil-dash/ 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!
- eldavido 10y ago
  So, two things. 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)

deleted 10y ago

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lovehashbrowns 10y ago

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.

GarethX 10y ago
ah cool - if you're new to Node.js, then be sure to check out our free interactive course: https://gomix.com/#!/project/node-beginner https://gomix.com/#!/project/node-beginner

spraak 10y ago

Just use Zeit's 'now'

cocktailpeanuts 10y ago

Why is a post about a product launch that was made a month ago #1 on HN right now? Did something happen?

mjolk 10y ago
Someone pushing their social network to come here and upvote.
- anildash 10y ago
  Nah, if we'd have done that it certainly wouldn't have been while I was asleep and over a major holiday.
  - mjolk 10y ago
    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.

Stratoscope 10y ago

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"

kaosjester 10y ago

I read the blog post and I still have no idea what Gomix is. Is it just a web-based nodejs ide?

GarethX 10y ago
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/ https://gomix.com/about/
rickyc091 10y ago
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...

abbot2 10y ago

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...

GarethX 10y ago
Here you go: https://gomix.com/about/ https://gomix.com/about/
- abbot2 10y ago
  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.
  - GarethX 10y ago
    Here's the text of the page for you: 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!

user5994461 10y ago

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. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/page-hacker/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/page-hacker/

arkitaip 10y ago
"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." How it works video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPc6dXBFhA4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPc6dXBFhA4
frozenport 10y ago
I think we need to replace the link with the actual product release.
te_chris 10y ago
Yawn. Does this genre of comment have to be top of every thread?
- nzjrs 10y ago
  It's warranted in this case as it's responding to the worst launch post I can recall reading.
  - hashhar 10y ago
    This is actually not the launch post. This is the launch post [1]. 1: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/05/31/introducing-hyperdev/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/05/31/introducing-hyperd...

pacaro 10y ago

Is a software company founded in 2000 really "venerable"? I would have thought that would be more appropriate for software companies founded 40+ years ago — around longer than most careers

kowdermeister 10y ago
It's not the length of operation, but the track record.

brylie 10y ago

Will Gomix be open source?

anildash 10y ago
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.

EugeneOZ 10y ago

One more tool for managers and non-tech product owners, to sell them idea "any cool app can be made just by few clicks of mouse, your dreams will come true, developers are lying about complexity". And in reality all of these "just copy-paste from github" will require tons of work to integrate, because in reality 3 party plugins are not so carefully prepared for Gomix as in their video presentation.

ayanray 10y ago
As an aside, does anyone have a list of tools that are in this category of "One more tool for managers and non-tech product owners, to sell them idea \"any cool app can be made just by few clicks of mouse, your dreams will come true\"". What's a good place to find such tools?
- EugeneOZ 10y ago
  Even if you are trolling, good example of such products: PHPMaker. I hate it wholeheartedly as a programmer, but if you like tools like this - you will be satisfied :)

redsummer 10y ago

Anil Dash seems like a deeply creepy guy. He inserts race into everything: https://twitter.com/marcoarment/status/336853407698657280 https://twitter.com/marcoarment/status/336853407698657280 He gets people fired for making jokes: http://archive.is/ddDFz http://archive.is/ddDFz I'm sure Gomix will have some level of success, though I have no idea what it is from his post - which just seems to be about how his is now CEO and all the glory is his. I wonder how his team feel about that? Perhaps some of them are white, so the team doesn't matter?

janwillemb 10y ago
One tweet != everything
- BipolarElsa 10y ago
  classic brown-bashing
mmjaa 10y ago
I think Anil Dash is a creep. His involvement in Gomix and Fog Creek means I'm less interested in those projects, frankly. I think he's one of the bigger blowhards in this scene, and I don't see the value in his participation, given that he seems more interested in social engineering his way to the top than .. you know .. actual engineering.
- redsummer 10y ago
  Judging from the lack of clarity in his post, he doesn't seem to know what his own product is. But he sure knows that he is the new CEO (he mentions it a few times). And he certainly thinks the successes of Fog Creek somehow reflect on him - in fact he talks about that more than the product.
  - yitchelle 10y ago
    For me, it is a bad sign when the personalities in the company has a higher profile than the products it is selling/making. Fog Creek seems to be heading down this path.

deleted 10y ago

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benjaminjosephw 10y ago

Gomix looks like the most ideal tool for hackathons where multiple people can really quickly collaborate on a live updating prototype. It also seems like a fantastic tool for teaching since learners have a really tight feedback loop without any set-up. Obviously, most of us here aren't the real audience for this but I can see it really lowering the barrier of entry for a lot of people.

huhtenberg 10y ago

In Russian "Gomik" is an intentionally offensive, very rude form of "homosexual". Just FYI, Fog Creek.

deleted 10y ago

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mdekkers 10y ago

After reading that, I don't think I'd want to work at Fog Creek.

chvid 10y ago

This mostly seems to be about a new CEO at Fog Creek. I have never heard of him but appearantly he has a big following. And it appears that a very large number of people don't like him - enough to create a bunch of new accounts here at HN just to comment on his persona. Fog Creek has to me always been about Joel on Software. And to me they always got a lot of credit and extra attention to their products because of his excellent writing. It must be hard for a new CEO to follow up on that. As for the product; it has already been announced and discussed here earlier. Personally I fail to see what it adds to an already crowded space of online, web-based, collaborative development environments. Honestly I think has too few features and is kinda ugly. But given that Trello and Stack Overflow has very large user bases maybe it is able to push thru and gain critical mass.

WhitneyLand 10y ago
>I fail to see what it adds to an already crowded space Can you give an example? I'm not aware of many products that are attacking the problem of making coding easier and more fun in the same way they are.
- jeremiep 10y ago
  Countless people have tried to make programming "easier" and "more fun". It usually ends up into wishful thinking and lots of sentences with "awesome" and other words without any meaning in them. I'd rather make coding simpler than easier. The fun will naturally emerge out of using simpler constructs. This is exactly what Clojure did for me :) I tried many tools with Java/C#/C++/JavaScript/Ruby and whatnot and while they can be useful, they're not to the point of making code actually easier or fun in these languages - at least not nearly enough for all the learning they require you to do.
  - WhitneyLand 10y ago
    Oh yes I'm aware many have tried and most have failed. But that's why I'm glad to see another go at it. I'm convinced it's possible to strike a balance in designing such a product that catches on like wildfire. I think what they have is a decent start but could be a lot better. Maybe I'll share some of my own ideas if they are open to that kind of feedback.

olegp 10y ago

This is very similar to Akshell (http://toughbyte.com/akshell/ http://toughbyte.com/akshell/) which we worked on more than six years ago with @korenyushkin and that made the front page of HN on a number of occasions. Despite being promoted by Fog Creek, I suspect that Gomix will run into the same problem that we did: professional developers won't use it as they already have the tools they prefer, whereas hobbyists won't be willing to pay. Without a viable business model, a service like this won't grow. I hope I'm wrong though! AppJet, a similar service from a YC team (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppJet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppJet) was the reason I got into JavaScript. PS. If you're looking for something similar, but simpler and geared towards backend apps and micro services (think AWS Lambda), you should check out https://unitcluster.com/ https://unitcluster.com/

irq-1 10y ago
Don't people who are starting out find these systems to be too difficult? You have to know much more to use this, then the "view source" days: Http codes/headers, javascript, npm?, css... Those weren't things you dealt with when changing Html on your local browser. I'm sure I don't have a good perspective on what new coders can handle, but this seems like too much.
- olegp 10y ago
  Good point. AppJet and Akshell had their own built in libraries and guides, whereas with Gomix you're expected to already know about Node, NPM and figure out which libraries to use yourself. This is likely to make this too complex for people just starting out, making the model even less viable. On a somewhat related note, one thing I'd like to see is cheap Heroku like hosting for Node. Most Node web apps could get by with 64MB of memory and processes could be started quickly in response to incoming requests, making it possible to price this at 1 USD per app per month.
  - jacques_chester 10y ago
    Pivotal Web Services[0] uses Cloud Foundry, allowing you to specify any instance size you want, to the megabyte. (The pricing page[1] is deliberately simplified, but you really can specify to the megabyte what you want). [0] http://run.pivotal.io/ http://run.pivotal.io/ [1] http://run.pivotal.io/pricing/ http://run.pivotal.io/pricing/ Disclosure: I work for Pivotal.

scoot 10y ago

This seems like a slightly more balanced blog post (posted to HN a few weeks ago): https://medium.com/gomix/introducing-gomix-aec205c421cb#.jcdijcso1 https://medium.com/gomix/introducing-gomix-aec205c421cb#.jcd... Also discussed on this Show HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13116426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13116426

jimnotgym 10y ago

I am waiting for Fog reek to write something as good as Trello, and I'm not sure this is it. Trello is a genius piece of clear thinking, and is loved by non tech people, but has a 'power user' features and a decent API. I'm not sure about this Gomix thing. I might send my kids to have a play on it and see what they think. I can't imagine it is going to have the uptake of Trello though

throwaway274739 10y ago

Don't mean to be a wet blanket... but "Gomix" sounds/looks a lot like the Russian word for "faggot".

joelcollinsdc 10y ago

Saw this on medium and got excited. Checked for commentary on HN, and found Gomix was posted to HN 4 times with little fanfare (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=gomix.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=gomix.com). Now when a tech celebrity posts about it, the post blows up but is filled with discussion of the personality...

anildash 10y ago
I wrote this post the same day as the rest of the announcements; I don't know why my personal blog post took off now, but I'd definitely prefer to focus on the product, not me.
- eldavido 10y ago
  Anil - not sure you're still reading here but the civility with which you've handled a lot of criticism really impresses me.
  - anildash 10y ago
    Heh, thanks. I've been on the internet long enough to know most of what folks are going to fuss about on HN probably doesn't have much to actually do with me as a person.

facorreia 10y ago

> to stop coding from being an exclusionary priesthood for a small few Are there really people that see it that way? For me it's just the opposite, programming is a field that is easily accessible to anyone that's interested, with a very low entry bar. Since I learned to program when I was a teenager, by reading a book about the BASIC language and taking an introductory class where I could use a microcomputer, I have a hard time thinking about it as "an exclusionary priesthood for a small few".

enraged_camel 10y ago
>>programming is a field that is easily accessible to anyone that's interested, with a very low entry bar. Not according to the hordes of HN posters who regularly shit on coding bootcamps.
- no_wizard 10y ago
  Perhaps coding boot camps are the problem, and not the accessibility of learning to program? Not that I'm arguing bootcamps are bad, however there is a lot of junk out there. * with that said General Assembly I hear is pretty good, and there is a reason why a lot of companies let their employees go to some of their Bootcamps. The rest, I can't speak for, even on a incidental level.
blakeyrat 10y ago
I see it that way. That attitude used to exist back in the 90s, with products like HyperCard, Filemaker, even Microsoft Access. There was a time when it was just expected that development software had a graphical interface builder for developers to use. (Heck, even IDEs for really difficult languages, like C++, had them.) But "real developers" crapped all over those tools, especially Access. And when "real developers" create programming tools, they don't spend even 10 milliseconds thinking about accessibility or usability or user experience-- look at Git (created in 2005) as a perfect example. There was a time when terrible software like Git was mocked and derided, not praised. So while back in 1998, anybody could program their own recipe database with drag&drop and a little scripting in HyperCard or Access, now in 2016 they can't. They could try perhaps in one of the "leftover" easy environments, like WinForms, but it's about an order of magnitude more difficult to learn, and if they want to share their solution with someone, they have to learn Git which is about two orders of magnitude more difficult to learn. The world you grew up in no longer exists, and we move further from that ideal every year. Sorry, but the "high priesthood" concept (make everything difficult and annoying so we can demand more salary) won in our industry, and it won decades ago.

mrits 10y ago

After reading the blog and comments on here I now have a really bad impression of Fog Creek's CEO and little hope for their future.

tomc1985 10y ago

It's a little odd to read a "programming is just so gosh darn hard" sales pitch from Fog Creek.

anildash 10y ago
That might be my fault if I wrote this poorly. What I was trying to say was closer to "programming is fun, but all the prerequisites it takes to get code running these days aren't very satisfying".

dpweb 10y ago

I like this alot. For brainstorming and trying out quick ideas, its a really fast way to prototype server side code, even without the remix/social features. I'll explain why I think this product is important. Everyone knows the js dev world has fallen vicrim to the irresistable urge to abstract away and you end up with toolchain on top of toolchain. Node and express made it possible to get an app going instantly, but now, not so instant cause you have this that and the other to install and more importantly learn how to use. For example, since Stackoverflow was mentioned, take a look there at how many people are stuck, not on js, they're confused by Angular or whatever framework was supposed to make their life easier. Simpler frameworks and simpler ways are usually pretty well received, so I view gomix as being in that spirit. Congrats to the makers its an interesting tool.