8 ms·

I must say that this sounds exactly like TJ's Up blueprints [1]. TJ've been working on Apex Up for over a month [2]. [1]: https://medium.com/@tjholowaychuk/blu

I must say that this sounds exactly like TJ's Up blueprints [1]. TJ've been working on Apex Up for over a month [2]. [1]: https://medium.com/@tjholowaychuk/blueprints-for-up-1-5f8197179275 https://medium.com/@tjholowaychuk/blueprints-for-up-1-5f8197... [2]: https://github.com/apex/up https://github.com/apex/up

tjholowaychuk 9y ago
This was clearly rushed to get ready to compete with Up, it pretty much copies my blog post exactly in terms of implementation. Expect to see the other ideas from the repo in there soon. As I said on Twitter, it's a CLI, literally anyone can build this. Startups have their place but in this case it's such a cowardly way to run a business. Funny thing is it doesn't even follow best practices, they clearly don't have much experience in the space, which is evident in that they built almost nothing in two years, this is basically a hobby project. I can't compete with free though, so congrats, best of luck with your joke of a "company".
- juancampa 9y ago
  > Funny thing is it doesn't even follow best practices, they clearly don't have much experience in the space Do you mind elaborating on this?
  - tjholowaychuk 9y ago
    All of their resource management for DNS, certs, domains, etc is done using sub-commands which are not reviewable. Sure they can have an audit trail of events, but Terraform/CloudFormation are industry standard now, as changes can be easily previewed and reviewed by peers. Single-command deploys are cute, don't get me wrong, but it's ultimately a gimmick. It's great for solo or small teams, but for larger teams, they'll ALWAYS use CI, and they'll ALWAYS want to restrict damage that a single team member can do to the infrastructure. There's nothing novel about single-command deploys. Hell at Segment we had "/deploy blog" in Slack for the simple cases that we weren't worried about, tons of companies do this stuff. Most at very least have git -> CI deploys which is a more correct way to do things for real teams.
    - nikon 9y ago
      Will you support other cloud platforms?
      - tjholowaychuk 9y ago
        Yeah I have an issue open for it, but there's no point supporting others until AWS is very robust and feature-complete. Now's can't even tail logs by the looks of it haha, extremely premature announcement.
boundlessdreamz 9y ago
Up looks interesting but it supports only AWS while this is multicloud
- tjholowaychuk 9y ago
  https://github.com/apex/up/issues/4 https://github.com/apex/up/issues/4
  - boundlessdreamz 9y ago
    Nice. I thought you might not support others since you ruled it out for apex.
    - tjholowaychuk 9y ago
      Ah, yeah apex(1) doesn't have a revenue stream so it would have just been a huge maintenance burden :D
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
vnglst 9y ago
Yes and he was not amused, to put it mildly, just have a look at some of his tweets: https://mobile.twitter.com/tjholowaychuk/status/885580704037220352 https://mobile.twitter.com/tjholowaychuk/status/885580704037...
- etblg 9y ago
  That seems a bit immature
  - vnglst 9y ago
    Agreed, bit of a disappointment coming from someone I respect a lot for all his open source contributions
    - samstave 9y ago
      Well, emotions from feeling slighted are a hell of a tweetivator... see @RDJT
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
  - tjholowaychuk 9y ago
    What's the mature way to handle startups ruining opportunities for people who actually want to earn a real living, instead of hiding behind VCs like cowards? Sorry if my ranting comes off as immature, you're probably not wrong haha but I'm perfectly happy to discuss about how ridiculous Silicon Valley is, founders aren't special, they're not visionaries, just con artists. I'm not saying life is supposed to be fair, startups are designed to keep people like me from competing, it's just a huge joke to me.
    - PKop 9y ago
      I just think you need to flesh out your case more. What exactly is your beef? That they are operating something that doesn't have value, but burning VC cash? Perhaps the niche you're operating in simply isn't profitable? Seems like you're arguing that VC are funding something worthless or not worth much... but that you should be getting paid for building the same product? I'm a nobody in this field but know enough about you to get that you're extremely productive and talented. Why not go this route: https://www.indiehackers.com/ https://www.indiehackers.com/ Plenty of so called "lifestyle" businesses that make plenty of money. Of course it's not that easy, but find a niche and build a great product. Pure tech plays like cloud deployment infrastructure seems to be operating at such a hyper-competitive level, that there's no way to avoid either big VC money, or Google/Amazon themselves.
randall 9y ago
I think to add extra intrigue, they're former coworkers from a startup that imploded.
- vnglst 9y ago
  Did not know that! That might explain some of the sharpness of his criticism
- md224 9y ago
  What startup was that, may I ask?
  - brryant 9y ago
    Learnboost. They were responsible for creating some of the most popular node.js packages back in the day. But from what I recall, TJ was the most prolific developer there.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
_Marak_ 9y ago
Really not surprised to see rauchg (Guillermo Rauch) steal more ideas for his startup from colleagues. The entire premise of Zeit is something that I explained to him five years ago in a taxi ride. I was in active communication with Guillermo about developing the idea up until two years ago when he went silent for a month or two and I then I read the announcement for Zeit on Hacker News. I'm sure he'll sell Zeit to the first high-bidder and completely throw the development team under the bus ( like he did to TJ at his last startup ). If you don't believe me, you can just look at the Github activity for the Zeit organization. Guillermo has copy and pastied the same Now project into new projects several times ( which deletes the commit logs of several contributors giving him sole Git credit for the projects ).
- skrebbel 9y ago
  Isn't it a bit of a debunked trope that startup ideas have value?
  - _Marak_ 9y ago
    Trade secrets have value. There is a big difference between emulating or being inspired by another's idea versus actively collaborating with them and then simply stop working with them once you feel you don't need them anymore. Without people like TJ and myself, Zeit wouldn't exist. Buyer beware to whoever decides to acquire Zeit.
    - discordance 9y ago
      This feature does make it seem like they're dangling that they have a price tag to the big boys.
    - tjholowaychuk 9y ago
      Rauch talks as if he invented the one-command deploy, Heroku did this shit yearsssss ago, not to mention dozens of other platforms and tools. All they're doing is making a really crappy version of Heroku with 1/20 the features, poor performance characteristics, and putting a free price tag on it to keep people like me from competing.
endergen 9y ago
Both of them have worked together a ton and been in the same circles. Of course they are going to work on similar problem spaces.
PKop 9y ago
So you're implying that Zeit has been working on this for less than that time? The idea of a universal deployment tool seems like common sense once your business already deals with deployments, and behind the scenes uses multiple providers. Why the automatic assumption this idea was "stolen"?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

tjholowaychuk 9y ago

This was clearly rushed to get ready to compete with Up, it pretty much copies my blog post exactly in terms of implementation. Expect to see the other ideas from the repo in there soon. As I said on Twitter, it's a CLI, literally anyone can build this. Startups have their place but in this case it's such a cowardly way to run a business. Funny thing is it doesn't even follow best practices, they clearly don't have much experience in the space, which is evident in that they built almost nothing in two years, this is basically a hobby project. I can't compete with free though, so congrats, best of luck with your joke of a "company".

juancampa 9y ago
> Funny thing is it doesn't even follow best practices, they clearly don't have much experience in the space Do you mind elaborating on this?
- tjholowaychuk 9y ago
  All of their resource management for DNS, certs, domains, etc is done using sub-commands which are not reviewable. Sure they can have an audit trail of events, but Terraform/CloudFormation are industry standard now, as changes can be easily previewed and reviewed by peers. Single-command deploys are cute, don't get me wrong, but it's ultimately a gimmick. It's great for solo or small teams, but for larger teams, they'll ALWAYS use CI, and they'll ALWAYS want to restrict damage that a single team member can do to the infrastructure. There's nothing novel about single-command deploys. Hell at Segment we had "/deploy blog" in Slack for the simple cases that we weren't worried about, tons of companies do this stuff. Most at very least have git -> CI deploys which is a more correct way to do things for real teams.
  - nikon 9y ago
    Will you support other cloud platforms?
    - tjholowaychuk 9y ago
      Yeah I have an issue open for it, but there's no point supporting others until AWS is very robust and feature-complete. Now's can't even tail logs by the looks of it haha, extremely premature announcement.

boundlessdreamz 9y ago

Up looks interesting but it supports only AWS while this is multicloud

tjholowaychuk 9y ago
https://github.com/apex/up/issues/4 https://github.com/apex/up/issues/4
- boundlessdreamz 9y ago
  Nice. I thought you might not support others since you ruled it out for apex.
  - tjholowaychuk 9y ago
    Ah, yeah apex(1) doesn't have a revenue stream so it would have just been a huge maintenance burden :D

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

vnglst 9y ago

Yes and he was not amused, to put it mildly, just have a look at some of his tweets: https://mobile.twitter.com/tjholowaychuk/status/885580704037220352 https://mobile.twitter.com/tjholowaychuk/status/885580704037...

etblg 9y ago
That seems a bit immature
- vnglst 9y ago
  Agreed, bit of a disappointment coming from someone I respect a lot for all his open source contributions
  - samstave 9y ago
    Well, emotions from feeling slighted are a hell of a tweetivator... see @RDJT
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- tjholowaychuk 9y ago
  What's the mature way to handle startups ruining opportunities for people who actually want to earn a real living, instead of hiding behind VCs like cowards? Sorry if my ranting comes off as immature, you're probably not wrong haha but I'm perfectly happy to discuss about how ridiculous Silicon Valley is, founders aren't special, they're not visionaries, just con artists. I'm not saying life is supposed to be fair, startups are designed to keep people like me from competing, it's just a huge joke to me.
  - PKop 9y ago
    I just think you need to flesh out your case more. What exactly is your beef? That they are operating something that doesn't have value, but burning VC cash? Perhaps the niche you're operating in simply isn't profitable? Seems like you're arguing that VC are funding something worthless or not worth much... but that you should be getting paid for building the same product? I'm a nobody in this field but know enough about you to get that you're extremely productive and talented. Why not go this route: https://www.indiehackers.com/ https://www.indiehackers.com/ Plenty of so called "lifestyle" businesses that make plenty of money. Of course it's not that easy, but find a niche and build a great product. Pure tech plays like cloud deployment infrastructure seems to be operating at such a hyper-competitive level, that there's no way to avoid either big VC money, or Google/Amazon themselves.

randall 9y ago

I think to add extra intrigue, they're former coworkers from a startup that imploded.

vnglst 9y ago
Did not know that! That might explain some of the sharpness of his criticism
md224 9y ago
What startup was that, may I ask?
- brryant 9y ago
  Learnboost. They were responsible for creating some of the most popular node.js packages back in the day. But from what I recall, TJ was the most prolific developer there.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

_Marak_ 9y ago

Really not surprised to see rauchg (Guillermo Rauch) steal more ideas for his startup from colleagues. The entire premise of Zeit is something that I explained to him five years ago in a taxi ride. I was in active communication with Guillermo about developing the idea up until two years ago when he went silent for a month or two and I then I read the announcement for Zeit on Hacker News. I'm sure he'll sell Zeit to the first high-bidder and completely throw the development team under the bus ( like he did to TJ at his last startup ). If you don't believe me, you can just look at the Github activity for the Zeit organization. Guillermo has copy and pastied the same Now project into new projects several times ( which deletes the commit logs of several contributors giving him sole Git credit for the projects ).

skrebbel 9y ago
Isn't it a bit of a debunked trope that startup ideas have value?
- _Marak_ 9y ago
  Trade secrets have value. There is a big difference between emulating or being inspired by another's idea versus actively collaborating with them and then simply stop working with them once you feel you don't need them anymore. Without people like TJ and myself, Zeit wouldn't exist. Buyer beware to whoever decides to acquire Zeit.
  - discordance 9y ago
    This feature does make it seem like they're dangling that they have a price tag to the big boys.
  - tjholowaychuk 9y ago
    Rauch talks as if he invented the one-command deploy, Heroku did this shit yearsssss ago, not to mention dozens of other platforms and tools. All they're doing is making a really crappy version of Heroku with 1/20 the features, poor performance characteristics, and putting a free price tag on it to keep people like me from competing.

endergen 9y ago

Both of them have worked together a ton and been in the same circles. Of course they are going to work on similar problem spaces.

PKop 9y ago

So you're implying that Zeit has been working on this for less than that time? The idea of a universal deployment tool seems like common sense once your business already deals with deployments, and behind the scenes uses multiple providers. Why the automatic assumption this idea was "stolen"?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]