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Plug that I’m sure Brian won’t mind (he encouraged me to start a company a couple years ago): If you want to get started building serverless functions and APIs

Plug that I’m sure Brian won’t mind (he encouraged me to start a company a couple years ago): If you want to get started building serverless functions and APIs quickly, do it in your browser with https://code.xyz https://code.xyz - we just released it along with an announcement of our most recent $2M in funding from Stripe [1] who join Slack and others as investors and customers. Disclaimer: I’m the founder. [1] https://stdlib.com/blog/stripe-code-xyz https://stdlib.com/blog/stripe-code-xyz

wolfgang42 8y ago
See, this is exactly the sort of thing I'm complaining about. code.xyz gives some 'hello world' examples, but it doesn't even link to any docs--it just goes "look how easy it is! Here, sign in to our service!" I went hunting for the stdlib docs, and it took me five minutes to figure out how to call my service by HTTP--apparently I just get a special username.stdlib.io endpoint that I can call, but when I clicked 'Calling Services' the first thing I got was a page that explained how to use bearer tokens. I still don't know how I can POST to this endpoint, but I have learned that apparently stdlib has invented the concept of a 'source code' because apparently having a pre-canned Slack bot integration is super-important to any self-respecting FaaS provider. Also apparently I can find prebuilt 'source codes' in the 'stdlib registry', but the docs don't link to said registry, only the aforementioned Slack integration. At this point I gave up; I don't have the patience to learn a brand-new meaning for 'source codes' when all I want to do is make an API call when I get a webhook payload, which I already know how to do in a dozen lines of Python. I realize this complaint sounds kind of harsh; you're getting a lot of my frustration dumped on you. Really all I want is basically a managed, autoscaled version of Express.js. Maybe there's some reason it's like this (I've never worked with anything that could be remotely described as 'at scale', it's mostly been line-of-business apps with a few dozen users maximum, or at most a web shop that still runs on a single dedicated server), but it seems like all of the Serverless providers add a bunch of extra concepts and confusion on top of what should really be a simple principle. Or maybe I'm completely misunderstanding the point of Serverless and it's actually intended to solve a completely different problem I've never had--I'm also open to that explanation instead!
- keithwhor 8y ago
  When you run your code a link to your API endpoint is provided immediately: obviously this isn’t clear enough! Thanks for the feedback. We’ll make sure we fix this ASAP. :) No worries re: frustration. It happens!

wolfgang42 8y ago

See, this is exactly the sort of thing I'm complaining about. code.xyz gives some 'hello world' examples, but it doesn't even link to any docs--it just goes "look how easy it is! Here, sign in to our service!" I went hunting for the stdlib docs, and it took me five minutes to figure out how to call my service by HTTP--apparently I just get a special username.stdlib.io endpoint that I can call, but when I clicked 'Calling Services' the first thing I got was a page that explained how to use bearer tokens. I still don't know how I can POST to this endpoint, but I have learned that apparently stdlib has invented the concept of a 'source code' because apparently having a pre-canned Slack bot integration is super-important to any self-respecting FaaS provider. Also apparently I can find prebuilt 'source codes' in the 'stdlib registry', but the docs don't link to said registry, only the aforementioned Slack integration. At this point I gave up; I don't have the patience to learn a brand-new meaning for 'source codes' when all I want to do is make an API call when I get a webhook payload, which I already know how to do in a dozen lines of Python. I realize this complaint sounds kind of harsh; you're getting a lot of my frustration dumped on you. Really all I want is basically a managed, autoscaled version of Express.js. Maybe there's some reason it's like this (I've never worked with anything that could be remotely described as 'at scale', it's mostly been line-of-business apps with a few dozen users maximum, or at most a web shop that still runs on a single dedicated server), but it seems like all of the Serverless providers add a bunch of extra concepts and confusion on top of what should really be a simple principle. Or maybe I'm completely misunderstanding the point of Serverless and it's actually intended to solve a completely different problem I've never had--I'm also open to that explanation instead!

keithwhor 8y ago
When you run your code a link to your API endpoint is provided immediately: obviously this isn’t clear enough! Thanks for the feedback. We’ll make sure we fix this ASAP. :) No worries re: frustration. It happens!