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This looks pretty neat but I’m trying to understand the target market of Anvil. It seems like the intent is to target the market of people testing out ideas tha

• meredydd 9y ago
  Our customers do include quite a few startups or startup-shaped projects. They're typically either professional developers in a hurry, or "allied trades" [eg data science or sysadmin] who aren't familiar with the full Lovecraftian Web stack, but who can build things just fine if they have more sane tools. But there's a whole universe of companies who need to build internal tools. (If you're in a startup/tech-co bubble, you'll be astonished how many line-of-business Django or .NET developers are out there, and how much they are needed. They tend to quite enjoy meeting Anvil :). Unfortunately for the peanut gallery, their employers tend to be a little more leery of suppliers throwing their names around, so those customers will have to remain anonymous in HN comments...)
  • dalbasal 9y ago
    "Allied trades" widened to any people who willing/capable of programming some and "internal tools" (a) overlap in interesting way and (b) are still generally underserved and hence not programming enough, IMO. In some sense, programmers with no knowledge or interest in the work that's flowing through a workflow they are formalizing as a program... it's a lot like managers with no knowledge or interest in the work they're managing. In both cases the knowledge is not with the decision maker and the tools and an accumulation of small but many & frustrating mistakes is inevitable. Think of all the "understand your customer" and "build for yourself" advice, it's because insider, specialist knowledge and programming ability have to get together someplace and the advice wants to make it happen inside the programmers head. Well... there's another head this could take place in.
• tmuir 9y ago
  Are you familiar with Node Red? It is an IBM project that is a self hosted website you can run on a raspberry pi, or a traditional PC or server. The tool allows you to graphically build Node.js applications, through some key abstractions. Node you drag into the canvas has inputs and or outputs which can be connected to other nodes, by simply clicking and dragging between them. As an embedded developer, I was far more interested in determining the viability of an implementation than learning node.js. To me, Node Red is the superior evolution of node.js. But I can certainly appreciate that people who learned node.js to any degree, before finding out about Node Red, see far less utility in it than I do. For a mirror image of this phenomenon, Arduino allows novices to circumvent the traditional learning curve required to develop embedded systems, through its key abstractions. Yet, every embedded developer I know immediately attacks the downsides of Arduino. Its not really teaching its users much. At least in its infancy, much of the underlying code was cowboy spaghetti. You would never use Arduino in a production environment. Yet somehow, Arduino is flourishing. I'll admit that since it's open source, that is a key distinction. But Adafruit.com, and Sparkfun.com are literally printing money with Arduinos and the ecosystem they facilitated. Each is a private company, but each has revealed at least one year of revenue exceeding $30,000,000. Each also provides schematics, datasheets, and tutorials for every single product they sell, if it is within their rights to provide such information.
  • kylnew 9y ago
    Thanks, that’s an interesting and relatable analogy.