22 ms·

Remix web framework aquired by Shopify

558 points by betageek 4y ago

slimebot80 4y ago
Remix is wonderful. Combined with CloudFront, you can save a lot of money compared to Vercel when you become moderately successful. (yes, you'd need to be comfortable rolling your own to some degree, for some things, but honestly the value is huge)
- nerdyadventurer 4y ago
  Can you please explain more? I thought since it is server rendered it would cost more than SSG pages served from CDNs. Can we cache pages until they are changed in a CDN?
adoxyz 4y ago
Congrats to the Remix team. I'm not entirely sure how you acquire a web framework or what the end-goal is, but I'm sure smarter people than I have the done maths.
- PhoenixReborn 4y ago
  Acquihire - you're not looking to buy the framework itself, you're looking to get the people who built it to work for you instead.
EduardoBautista 4y ago
I don't understand what is the business case for acquiring an open-source framework? Can someone explain why couldn't they just contribute or fork the project?
- tmorton 4y ago
  It's an aquihire - they get the core team on staff. They can influence the open-source project roadmap, and get priority support for their integrations.
- SeanAnderson 4y ago
  It's pretty decent, passive marketing, too. One could argue a similar effect would be achieved by a fork, but I don't think it would ring as true to SWEs. I think about Google a lot more due to how prolific Material Design is throughout my web experience, I think about Meta a lot more due to how prolific React is throughout my web experience, etc.
- nilsbunger 4y ago
  Rewinding earlier, what is the case for VC investment in an open source framework? Usually it's some variation of proprietary extensions ("open core"), enterprise support, and/or hosting. Docker, Red Hat, MongoDB are prominent examples. So that could also be the rationale for Shopify acquiring it. Alternatively, they could've just wanted to acquihire an excellent team.
  - tough 4y ago
    You can learn more about OSS.Capital at their site, Joseph Jacks leaded the Remix funding a little less than a year ago, this is their first exit. He has a really cool concept on how Open Source Software will eat Software. https://twitter.com/JosephJacks_/status/1586507090096312321 https://twitter.com/JosephJacks_/status/1586507090096312321
- sgallant 4y ago
  Offering a great developer experience (DX) when building e-commerce sites is core to their strategy. DX was a key reason why they beat Squarespace in the early e-commerce days: developers preferred building Shopify sites over Squarespace sites. It's in Shopify's best interest to maintain that developer love and Remix can help with that. Here are two hypothetical situations to highlight that point: 1. If someone else, say, Swell [1], had better DX than Shopify, we would see Shopify start to lose market share to Swell for the segment of the market where developers can influence the tooling decision (i.e. agencies). 2. If in two years from now, everyone is using Next.js to build e-commerce sites, that would put Vercel (the company behind Next.js) in a good position to promote/partner with other e-commerce providers or build their own e-commerce solution and compete with Shopify. The developer market segment is important and DX is key there. [1] https://www.swell.is/ https://www.swell.is/
- Overtonwindow 4y ago
  Because some people want to make money with their acquisitions…
gabrielizaias 4y ago
Interesting move by Shopify, given that they have Hydrogen [0]. I was half expecting Hydrogen to become its own all-purpose framework, but alas, they seem to plan for both to co-exist. > While Hydrogen is focused on commerce, Remix is focused lower in the stack, and will continue to be a general web solution that scales from content through commerce and all the way to apps. Shopify will use Remix across many projects where it makes sense, and you can expect to see more of our developer platform with first-class Remix support over time. [0] https://hydrogen.shopify.dev https://hydrogen.shopify.dev
- jplhomer 4y ago
  We're working on a new version of Hydrogen which is powered by Remix: https://hydrogen.shopify.dev/roadmap/ https://hydrogen.shopify.dev/roadmap/ It's nice to not have to build two meta-frameworks (along with docs and support) so Hydrogen can focus on commerce things.
  - matthewcford 4y ago
    Will there be beta releases before Feb? I'm looking to kick off some headless shopify projects soon - and ideally I don't have to rewrite them in a few months time.
    - jplhomer 4y ago
      Yes. We are working on it right now. If you are comfortable in Remix, that’s a great place to start. Everything from Hydrogen will be additive from there.
jdelman 4y ago
Congratulations to the Remix team. Though neither Remix's nor Shopify's blog posts make it clear, I'm guessing Michael and Ryan will continue to lead Remix development while hopefully having a team of focused engineers working with them. Since Shopify really believes in and wants to use the tech, it's great that they'll be able to pay engineers to continue to develop it in the open. I believe Remix also was VC funded so Shopify probably also made their investors whole?
- swyx 4y ago
  happy noises from JJ who led their seed https://twitter.com/josephjacks_/status/1587136935981481984?s=46&t=rC-81uvWadwXaGzLN_aOYQ https://twitter.com/josephjacks_/status/1587136935981481984?...
  - warent 4y ago
    Nice little chunk of change for him! Wow and their (OSS Capital) first exit since founding in 2018. Talk about patience, but well worth it I'm sure!
    - daniel_iversen 4y ago
      4 years doesn’t really seem like a lot of patience, or is that generally considered long?
      - swyx 4y ago
        not long. generally takes 7-10 years
pearjuice 4y ago
Any ideas about acquisition cost? How do you value a FOSS project?
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  talent hires + brand trademark
- tbeseda 4y ago
  GitHub star count /s
jspash 4y ago
There seems to be a disconnect between what Shopify do internally and what they ask of their users. With Hydrogen and now Remix you would think they have their sh*t together. But when the official docs recommend that you inline jquery click handlers for a simple adjustment to their shop, I just don't know what to think. All in all the Shopify dev experience for me is on par with Wordpress. I hold my nose and cash the cheques. Then hurriedly leave the premises in a long trench coat with my hat pulled down to avoid being recognised.
- theturtletalks 4y ago
  They have a perfectly good Storefront API that allows you to build any storefront. We use Shopify with Next.js and if we ever wanted to switch platforms, we would just change the API calls and keep the same frontend.
- dmix 4y ago
  There's often a disconnect between the technical staff who write customer-facing documentation vs the backend engineering teams. Often the technical writers will be working closely with real customers. The customers will come to them 90% of the time with hacky custom jQuery stores + the support staff won't be highly skilled Front-end engineers (usually a junior-dev grasp of JS/web dev).
  - leviathant 4y ago
    Shopify likes to brag about having 4,000 developers. Given the output of the company - that comes across to me as bloat.
    - dewey 4y ago
      Judging the visible output as a metric for how many developers a company needs is very naive. Think about the teams that don't directly interact with the outside like infrastructure, business intelligence, hiring (onboarding tools), internal tooling, all the work they do on Ruby (https://shopify.engineering/shopify-ruby-at-scale-research-investment https://shopify.engineering/shopify-ruby-at-scale-research-i...).
whalesalad 4y ago
we buyin frameworks now
- super256 4y ago
  Anyone remembers that upon Remix' initial release, one had to buy a licence for 250 USD? https://web.archive.org/web/20201204025307/https://remix.run/buy https://web.archive.org/web/20201204025307/https://remix.run...
  - PKop 4y ago
    So what? This is akin to crowdfunding, or patronage. Many people were happy to have early access while supporting the project.
    - super256 4y ago
      I just wanted to post this here because I think it's an interesting piece of trivia.
  - esprehn 4y ago
    Michael and Ryan have always been about trying to make money from their React expertise. They literally created a company called React Training: https://reacttraining.com/team https://reacttraining.com/team and have had a fairly lucrative business doing workshops for years. No harm in trying to get folks to pay for a framework. It doesn't seem it worked, but I can't fault them for trying!
    - zwily 4y ago
      React Training worked really well, was very profitable till Covid shut it down. Obviously not a scalable startup type thing but still a nice little business.
    - jholman 4y ago
      Apropos of which, it always baffled me how bad the React Router documentation was, given that the company name was react-training. It was like an anti-ad.
colinramsay 4y ago
I'm not sure how to feel about this, but my main wish for Remix is a public roadmap and full development in the open. There is overlap but also healthy competition between it and NextJS, and I'm really interested to see where Remix goes next.
- PKop 4y ago
  .
  - nathancahill 4y ago
    I read the opposite. There currently isn't, so it will be Ryan's #1 focus.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
tfsh 4y ago
the https://remix.run https://remix.run website is beautifully fun. I know lots of people will berate it for being OTT, but scrolling I wouldn't say is a critical path given the docs/get-started call to actions. I'd be interested to see what Shopify do with remix, are they more interested in the core team, maintaining remix.run as they plan to/do(?) use it internally. I assume they want to offer this framework as a baked in enhancement of Hydrogen[1] to try and help clients build more robust sites. 1: https://hydrogen.shopify.dev https://hydrogen.shopify.dev
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  It is fun! The Windows crash screen made me laugh.
- yen223 4y ago
  I really like the website. I think it did a great job at telling us why we should care about Remix the framework, what problem it was designed to solve. A lot of websites for other OSS projects struggle with this.
Zealotux 4y ago
Congratulations! I was keeping an eye on this project for production use, and this news is boosting my confidence.
alberth 4y ago
Why acquire something that is MIT licensed? Is this really just a talent acquisition? https://github.com/remix-run/remix https://github.com/remix-run/remix
- marstall 4y ago
  that was my thought. an acqhire glammed up. from what I can tell remix isn't generating much heat.
- mdasen 4y ago
  I wouldn't really call it a talent acquisition. It's more the same reason that any company pays people to work on open source projects. For example, Google pays people to make Flutter and Dart. Are those employees a "talent acquisition"? Clearly no because they started the project within Google. So then why is Google paying people to work on some MIT licensed thing? Well, it gives them a high-quality bit of code to build the things that are actually their business and it gives them a certain amount of control over the direction and priorities of the project. Let's say that I make a library X that your company uses. You can use X for free so why acquire X? Well, if X is a project of your company, that can give your company positive reputational benefits by association. You can set the priorities and roadmap of X. I'd be working at your company so I'd be there to help other developers. I'd see the friction you had in your environment and want to remove that friction. I'm not saying that the owner of an MIT licensed project can do anything they want. There's always the possibility of forks. However, there is still a certain amount of control. For example, Google's control of Go basically meant that they controlled the decision to go with a non-copying garbage collector because that was what would be best for Google and its codebase (and most people wouldn't care about the trade-offs that much). I think it's more than just "here are some smart people we can acquihire." I think it gives them influence over a project they might see as important.
lairv 4y ago
Aren't Remix and Hydrogen supposed to fill the same role ? Despite what Remix's creators try to argue, for me Remix is great for low interactivity website like e-commerce website, even doing a simple client-side request without refresh is a pain in Remix
- jplhomer 4y ago
  We'll be redesigning Hydrogen to be powered by Remix: https://hydrogen.shopify.dev/roadmap/ https://hydrogen.shopify.dev/roadmap/
asim 4y ago
Didn't Remix raise funding? Trying to read between the lines here. No appetite to raise further funding? Too much competition? Just curious.
- PhoenixReborn 4y ago
  They did raise funding. It's unclear to me what their business model would have been (compete with Vercel?), and maybe the struggle to find one was why they decided to go for an acquisition.
  - zebnyc 4y ago
    I remember they had a really expensive subscription model (even for solo developers). They were looking to get traction based on the reputation of the founders and other tech influencers (like Kent C Dodds) in the react community. Personally I felt that they were not very clear on who their target audience was and what was the niche that they were trying to address to transition from good to great dev experience.
    - bredren 4y ago
      >They were looking to get traction based on the reputation of the founders and other tech influencers (like Kent C Dodds) in the react community. This had the opposite effect for me. I bought Dodds' Epic React course and it seemed to have been kicked to the curb in favor of joining and boosting Remix. I remember some important course updates were pending, and seemed to come to a standstill while his entire blog was re-written in Remix. Then a month or so later he joined that team. I really liked his prior educational content, in this it seemed like paid promotion for a particular framework. The VC raise and bringing Dodds on seemed like peak (hopefully!) hypecycle for frontend JS stuff.
rglover 4y ago
I'm always accepting refugees [1]. [1] https://github.com/cheatcode/joystick https://github.com/cheatcode/joystick
Existenceblinks 4y ago
I have strange feeling about these nodejs server based and the direction of the web and the chaotic of Big|VC-backed corps playing chess. And that also causes effect on web job market. .. what's your retirement plan?
- woutr_be 4y ago
  In what sense would this change anything to the job market or your retirement plans? Hasn't the web always gone through changes, were people had to adjust? Software development has always been (in my opinion) an ever changing environment, where you had to adjust your skill set in order to keep up. Sure some technologies change faster than others, and it's not always the right choices being made, and maybe people jump on these new technologies rather quickly, but people innovating, and learning from failures should be a good thing.
Toine 4y ago
I'll stick to NextJS. Remix seemed fishy from the very start.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  I share your feeling, but I don’t think it’s reasonable. I’ve used both now and it’s just fine as a framework. Maybe it’s in the way they present themselves.
  - phgn 4y ago
    Definitely it's how Remix presents itself. Their landing page reads like a marketing pitch by some crazy startup looking to raise money, not like a stable library to build a product on. You have to scroll quite far to get any factual information on what differentiates it from Next.js. I quote: > Focused on web standards and modern web app UX, you’re simply going to build better websites
    - slimebot80 4y ago
      Would NextJS's Apple-style marketing pitch at their events be more convincing to you?
      - phgn 4y ago
        No, I'm also not following the latest Vercel news. It feels way too corporate.
- kylehotchkiss 4y ago
  To me, Remix seemed like a very lightweight reimagining of what Next excelled at (server side react with nice frontend integration). It was exciting to see how quickly it handled dynamic renders when running from a Cloudflare worker. But now that Next 13 has layouts/server components, I prefer Next.js' approach due to all the other performance work they've done with images, fonts, css, etc. One thing about Remix that always confused me was the very close ties to react router. It seemed like a distinct and unrelated concept to me, and the continued association seemed like a distraction from Remix's potential to be a stronger competitor to NextJS in the long run
emadabdulrahim 4y ago
This is huge. Remix is my favorite React framework at the moment. It is by far the best abstraction I've seen of client/server model. Their API abstraction layer is just right, working with native browser and nodejs APIs, not obscure them. Typescript support is amazing. I'd bet my money on Remix model and direction vs Nextjs
- evtothedev 4y ago
  > I'd bet my money on Remix model and direction vs Nextjs With Nextjs 13, the patterns are actually kind of converge. See this whole thread from Ryan at Remix with his thoughts on it: https://twitter.com/ryanflorence/status/1586820806625046529 https://twitter.com/ryanflorence/status/1586820806625046529
  - rektide 4y ago
    this drive to remake runat="server" worries me. i get the good intrnt to make pages fast, but making thin client pages like this radically reduces the general utility & agency of the web. good discussion. still a worrying world to me.
    - RussianCow 4y ago
      > i get the good intrnt to make pages fast, but making thin client pages like this radically reduces the general utility & agency of the web. I'm not sure what you mean by this. Remix and related technologies don't limit what you can do on the client—you still have the full power of React at your fingertips. The difference is that they blur the lines between client and server such that you get more or less seamless server-side rendering in order to populate a web page before you hydrate it client-side with React. If anything, Remix allows you to use React for more use cases where it otherwise would not have been the right tool.
      - rektide 4y ago
        a developr can limit the power of user-agency by moving increasing amounts of power to the server. this trend amplifies developers potential. and it allows targetting "dumber" web clients. yay, good things. but it also makes the most advanced & competent web users less able & less capable. web apps have, for a while now, been fairly client-heavy, in a way that enables hacking & creativity. i'd love a strong counter-thesis for why this isn't the case, but this feels like a mainframization of computing, a push towards centralized control. it has upsides, as you point out, but also it keeps much more reserved & controlled & hidden. that is not very "web" like, tbh.
emptysea 4y ago
I’m curious if remix will remain general purpose or if it will gradually drift into just being used for Shopify things.
jacquesc 4y ago
Anyone currently using Remix in a production app? Read through the docs and it seems pretty interesting. Can't really get a sense for how stable it is though. I know from prior use of React Router, the maintainers love the big rewrites between major version numbers.
- Existenceblinks 4y ago
  Mix feeling of this Correlation: React Router -> Remix Redux -> RSC Snowpack -> Astro "This time, we will make it right" kind of feeling.
  - roryokane 4y ago
    What’s RSC? Edit – I think I found it: RSC is React Server Components. Per React’s December 2020 blog post https://reactjs.org/blog/2020/12/21/data-fetching-with-react-server-components.html https://reactjs.org/blog/2020/12/21/data-fetching-with-react... and June 2022 blog post https://reactjs.org/blog/2022/06/15/react-labs-what-we-have-been-working-on-june-2022.html https://reactjs.org/blog/2022/06/15/react-labs-what-we-have-..., the technology is still in development. Searches like “RSC JavaScript” and “RSC Redux” didn’t turn up anything. I only found the term “React Server Components” in the comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29994621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29994621 while reading discussion of a January 2022 blog post “Remix vs Next.js”.
    - Existenceblinks 4y ago
      I hear. There's quite many kool-aid words in this area, that keeps coming up. "Island", "partial hydration", "isomorphic", without given context it's just non-sense. Even experienced developers hearing "SSR" would wonder .. wait what, why are you bringing up this obvious "server-sided rendering" .. turns out javascript folks treat it like something no one haven't ever done before. It's all confusing.
- colinramsay 4y ago
  Yes. The use of loaders and actions blurs the lines between client and server. It's really productive. There are a few gaps that need filling, one that comes to mind is internationalisation [1] I am very surprised that NextJS has left it so long to consider mutations - they're apparently coming up with an RFC on that but it seems to be somewhat behind closed doors. [1] https://github.com/remix-run/remix/discussions/2877 https://github.com/remix-run/remix/discussions/2877
lloydatkinson 4y ago
Wow. With the recent remix drama this is an interesting development.
- rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 4y ago
  Which one more specifically? :)
- thangngoc89 4y ago
  I don't follow discord or their github's repo, just reading release notices so could you please elaborate?
  - lloydatkinson 4y ago
    One of the main authors tweeted a bunch of crap about numerous other frameworks and then delete it a few hours later
nell 4y ago
~No they aren't rebuilding Hydrogen in Remix.~ Edit: Spoke too soon on the above, sorry. Remix raised funding. Ran out of money with no scope to self sustain or raise money. They downsized (see Kent Dodds. Perhaps there are others). Strong engineers that built the platform got acquihired.
- eatonphil 4y ago
  > No they aren't rebuilding Hydrogen in Remix. Looks like they are. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33407274 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33407274
dyeje 4y ago
Is Shopify shifting away from Rails?
- tekbog 4y ago
  This is something I'd like to know as well and nobody is talking about it, weird.
  - fuzzygroup 4y ago
    Amen!
  - Existenceblinks 4y ago
    Remember the whining people don't take action .. but the guys who have been silent all along quit .. suddenly shocking everyone? They will keep saying everything is going great!
- theklr 4y ago
  Probably not, but going where the market is in terms of business. Majority of their headless support is for react so investing in the stack allows them to expand and dictate that future. (Ancedata: did headless Shopify with ember and was aggravated in how piss poor their js support was in relation to React until their dev team told the data).
- kylehotchkiss 4y ago
  Shopify has a nice GraphQL API that can be used to build JS frontends: https://github.com/Shopify/quilt/tree/main/packages/react-graphql https://github.com/Shopify/quilt/tree/main/packages/react-gr... I imagine that paired with Remix it'd be easy and fun to build shops. It doesn't have to replace rails in that regard.
- ecshafer 4y ago
  We use a lot of React at Shopify on top of Rails, along with Go and Rust for critical performance systems on the backend.
orliesaurus 4y ago
I never used Remix, why is it worth it investing in Remix?
- Scarbutt 4y ago
  It's just an optimization to make your react pages load faster.
- vosper 4y ago
  Having used both, if you already know NextJS well then I wouldn't bother switching to Remix. If you want some of the Remixy API-niceness in NextJS land then you can use tRPC (for example, there are probably other options). Nothing against Remix, I do like it, it just isn't differentiated enough from NextJS to both switching for me - yet, at least.
  - elevaet 4y ago
    And what about if you've not used either framework before but would like to try one? Which one would you recommend?
    - vosper 4y ago
      For work: NextJS, because Remix's future is now a little less clear. Also, there's 10x the help and documentation for NextJS. NextJS is where the mindshare is, for better or worse. For fun: Whichever appeals to you :)
- threatofrain 4y ago
  With the recent updates to Next there isn't enough differentiation between the two IMO. Given that Next has huge buy-in from the JS ecosystem, choosing Next is a better bet. If Next had come out with their new updates a few months ago then I wouldn't have picked Remix. I don't regret using Remix as I just wanted React Router + easy SSR, but it's also because of this that it wasn't very differentiated.
ComputerGuru 4y ago
remix feels like the react version of htmx. I'd just use the latter, tbh.
- exogen 4y ago
  I suspect you are confused about what Remix is, unless I vastly misunderstand htmx. By example, a request comes into my app's web server at `/posts/123`: how would htmx be involved at all in (1) understanding the request, and (2) generating the response? Remix isn't just client-side, it's also a server with routing and SSR.
  - ComputerGuru 4y ago
    Yes, the routing part isn’t covered by stock htmx but it can be shimmed server-side or client-side. The more “fundamental” bit as I understand it is that each logical/visible component is served by the server-side in a remix app as a separate, fully-rendered html component, instead of needing to render the entirety of the response to effectively obtain just a part of the view. Htmx provides that bit of the puzzle lending the remix-like aspect to a traditional server-side app.
kkielhofner 4y ago
Interesting development. If I were to guess who would acquire (acquihire?) Remix I would have said Cloudflare.
- youngtaff 4y ago
  Cloudflare acquihired the Linc team a while back
tasubotadas 4y ago
How does remix compare to nextjs?
- krtscrum 4y ago
  https://remix.run/blog/remix-vs-next https://remix.run/blog/remix-vs-next
- megaman821 4y ago
  Remix looks like a standard server rendered web framework (like Rails or Django) except that is use React for its template language, and React has the advantage of running interactively on the client-side. NextJS pre-generates (or generates on a trigger) most its pages. Like Remix it also uses React as its template language and client-side interactivity.
wizwit999 4y ago
Everyone raised seed funding recently, I wonder what was even their idea of monetization.
SevenNation 4y ago
This post is puzzling: 1. Michael Jackson tags himself as "Co-founder, CEO." 2. Remix website gives no indication that it's a company or that there is a company called "Remix." What's going on here? What exactly what "acquired?"
dheera 4y ago
How do you acquire a framework? Why not just use it? It's not like there are physicists trying to acquire Dirac notation.
airstrike 4y ago
This is likely a better link: https://shopify.engineering/remix-joins-shopify https://shopify.engineering/remix-joins-shopify
interstice 4y ago
Having built a number of headless Shopify sites in Next JS this is slightly concerning, I was imagining a port over to Hydrogen at some later date with minimal changes rather than a total replatform. Of course a replatform wouldn't be necessary if Shopify would help out by - for example - not force logging out (and otherwise breaking checkout) for users that came from a headless store.
lirbank 4y ago
Is this really a good thing though? Sounds a bit more like a soft landing than a success story. I am not sure this is in the interest for the framework either. Michael and Ryan will stay for two years until their lockin is over and then resign and start building the next thing (a good thing).
lirbank 4y ago
Also, why did Kent C Dodds leave a while ago? I mean, not the official story, but the actual one? He became a co-founder and left within a year...
- qudat 4y ago
  My guess is there's way more money in his educational endeavors
  - lirbank 4y ago
    That implies he considered Remix a failure and left. Interesting.
    - utahthrowaway28 4y ago
      I doubt it. Honestly I suspect he saw more money in building content that he owned 100% based on his personal brand, whereas contributing to a project that he only owned a fraction of wasn’t up his alley.
      - lirbank 4y ago
        He is a co-founder so I would believe he had more than a fraction of (unvested) stonks. A co-founder that left within a year, and prolly dropped all his shares (cliff, again my assumption).
- utahthrowaway28 4y ago
  I don’t know the exact details of why he left, but I can say that a lot of us were surprised and confused when he joined Remix. The other Remix founders have great reputations everywhere they’ve worked, but Kent has kind of developed into a personality cult over the years. His courses and personal brand have no doubt been very profitable for him, so I’m not too surprised to see him go back toward personal brand building and trying to increase the reach of his courses. I have a lot of respect for education initiatives and efforts to create educational content, but I’ve also had to do a lot of “deprogramming” of juniors who consumed a lot of Kent C Dodds material and end up trying to overengineer everything. He also had an expensive React testing course a couple years ago that was really disappointing, which burned a lot of goodwill among the community.
cutler 4y ago
Does this presage the eventual end of Rails at Shopify?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
royletron 4y ago
Is it me or is Remix sort of a weird, and slightly sketchy flip of the OSS money making pipe? I understand that people can take open source projects and turn a business around them by providing hosting (Vercel/Next for example), but having people 'invest' in an open source framework just seems fundamentally wrong. What is the payout for those investors, what have Shopify actually given (and to whom) for what it has 'aquired' here? Also what of the $3m Remix 'raised' last October, where has that gone, what did those people get in return? I just fail to see where the return is on all of this...
- lewisflude 4y ago
  The remix team own the name, and npm package distribution rights. The money is used to fund development. I think you've got some good points here around the weirdness that happens when someone builds a business around something that is fundamentally open. In theory, someone could hard fork remix, rename it and do their own thing. The moat they've built is around the specific team working on remix, the remix community, the remix name, npm distribution rights etc. The "return" for investors will probably come in the form of selling highly integrated services (like vercel). But right now it seems to be mostly about growing remix to a critical mass. As a user, I've really enjoyed building projects with remix and I think they've built a solid community. Good article you might find interesting: https://robertcooper.me/post/reflecting-on-remix-open-source-investor-funding https://robertcooper.me/post/reflecting-on-remix-open-source...
  - royletron 4y ago
    This is great, thanks for the link. I suppose I just find it strange that they haven't yet suggested what the revenue generation is for them as a whole. I only say this anecdotally, but I am pretty certain Next/Vercel/Zeit, Deno, Gatsby and Apollo all fired off their funding based on the revenue generation from their companion commercial offerings - and funding was for the revenue generating parts not specifically the OSS. As for Remix as a whole, I'd be interested in hearing more opinion on what makes it successful? Right now I am totally invested/obsessed in Next, tRPC & Prisma as our stack of choice!
sixbrx 4y ago
I've settled on using Java for backends since it's just so robust and performant. But damn if this new round of TS-enabled frameworks (Remix, Next, SvelteKit, QwikCity etc) isn't compelling with their full-stack type safety and easy development. Using same component-oriented vocabulary to seamlessly switch between and even combine client and server rendering, and co-locating client code with data loading all in TS with end to end type safety, is hard to beat. Makes me worry about being left out with non-TS backend like Java. Interested to see how this develops.
spinlock 4y ago
As someone who started off in Ember and then began developing in React: I've never liked React Router. IMO, the url is best treated as data because it doesn't work well as part of the presentation layer. The interesting part (for me) is that I'm pretty locked into React because of Shopify's Polaris project.
- aatd86 4y ago
  Just curious. What do you mean by the URL is best treated as data and what does remix do instead? Disclaimer: I'm building a non-js frontend framework and for me the URL is a serialized representation of Application state modulo runtime data.
deevus 4y ago
We're having massive issues with Shopify at the moment. They decided that for us to integrate with them, we HAVE TO use Shopify's billing system. We had been using them with an unlisted app for a long time and our mutual customers loved it. Recently Shopify decided to cut off our unlisted app (or whatever they call it) so that our users can no longer connect to Shopify. The only way we can get verified is to use their billing (we're using Stripe).

558 points by betageek 4y ago

Remix is wonderful. Combined with CloudFront, you can save a lot of money compared to Vercel when you become moderately successful. (yes, you'd need to be comfortable rolling your own to some degree, for some things, but honestly the value is huge)

nerdyadventurer 4y ago
Can you please explain more? I thought since it is server rendered it would cost more than SSG pages served from CDNs. Can we cache pages until they are changed in a CDN?

adoxyz 4y ago

Congrats to the Remix team. I'm not entirely sure how you acquire a web framework or what the end-goal is, but I'm sure smarter people than I have the done maths.

PhoenixReborn 4y ago
Acquihire - you're not looking to buy the framework itself, you're looking to get the people who built it to work for you instead.

EduardoBautista 4y ago

I don't understand what is the business case for acquiring an open-source framework? Can someone explain why couldn't they just contribute or fork the project?

tmorton 4y ago
It's an aquihire - they get the core team on staff. They can influence the open-source project roadmap, and get priority support for their integrations.
SeanAnderson 4y ago
It's pretty decent, passive marketing, too. One could argue a similar effect would be achieved by a fork, but I don't think it would ring as true to SWEs. I think about Google a lot more due to how prolific Material Design is throughout my web experience, I think about Meta a lot more due to how prolific React is throughout my web experience, etc.
nilsbunger 4y ago
Rewinding earlier, what is the case for VC investment in an open source framework? Usually it's some variation of proprietary extensions ("open core"), enterprise support, and/or hosting. Docker, Red Hat, MongoDB are prominent examples. So that could also be the rationale for Shopify acquiring it. Alternatively, they could've just wanted to acquihire an excellent team.
- tough 4y ago
  You can learn more about OSS.Capital at their site, Joseph Jacks leaded the Remix funding a little less than a year ago, this is their first exit. He has a really cool concept on how Open Source Software will eat Software. https://twitter.com/JosephJacks_/status/1586507090096312321 https://twitter.com/JosephJacks_/status/1586507090096312321
sgallant 4y ago
Offering a great developer experience (DX) when building e-commerce sites is core to their strategy. DX was a key reason why they beat Squarespace in the early e-commerce days: developers preferred building Shopify sites over Squarespace sites. It's in Shopify's best interest to maintain that developer love and Remix can help with that. Here are two hypothetical situations to highlight that point: 1. If someone else, say, Swell [1], had better DX than Shopify, we would see Shopify start to lose market share to Swell for the segment of the market where developers can influence the tooling decision (i.e. agencies). 2. If in two years from now, everyone is using Next.js to build e-commerce sites, that would put Vercel (the company behind Next.js) in a good position to promote/partner with other e-commerce providers or build their own e-commerce solution and compete with Shopify. The developer market segment is important and DX is key there. [1] https://www.swell.is/ https://www.swell.is/
Overtonwindow 4y ago
Because some people want to make money with their acquisitions…

gabrielizaias 4y ago

Interesting move by Shopify, given that they have Hydrogen [0]. I was half expecting Hydrogen to become its own all-purpose framework, but alas, they seem to plan for both to co-exist. > While Hydrogen is focused on commerce, Remix is focused lower in the stack, and will continue to be a general web solution that scales from content through commerce and all the way to apps. Shopify will use Remix across many projects where it makes sense, and you can expect to see more of our developer platform with first-class Remix support over time. [0] https://hydrogen.shopify.dev https://hydrogen.shopify.dev

jplhomer 4y ago
We're working on a new version of Hydrogen which is powered by Remix: https://hydrogen.shopify.dev/roadmap/ https://hydrogen.shopify.dev/roadmap/ It's nice to not have to build two meta-frameworks (along with docs and support) so Hydrogen can focus on commerce things.
- matthewcford 4y ago
  Will there be beta releases before Feb? I'm looking to kick off some headless shopify projects soon - and ideally I don't have to rewrite them in a few months time.
  - jplhomer 4y ago
    Yes. We are working on it right now. If you are comfortable in Remix, that’s a great place to start. Everything from Hydrogen will be additive from there.

jdelman 4y ago

Congratulations to the Remix team. Though neither Remix's nor Shopify's blog posts make it clear, I'm guessing Michael and Ryan will continue to lead Remix development while hopefully having a team of focused engineers working with them. Since Shopify really believes in and wants to use the tech, it's great that they'll be able to pay engineers to continue to develop it in the open. I believe Remix also was VC funded so Shopify probably also made their investors whole?

swyx 4y ago
happy noises from JJ who led their seed https://twitter.com/josephjacks_/status/1587136935981481984?s=46&t=rC-81uvWadwXaGzLN_aOYQ https://twitter.com/josephjacks_/status/1587136935981481984?...
- warent 4y ago
  Nice little chunk of change for him! Wow and their (OSS Capital) first exit since founding in 2018. Talk about patience, but well worth it I'm sure!
  - daniel_iversen 4y ago
    4 years doesn’t really seem like a lot of patience, or is that generally considered long?
    - swyx 4y ago
      not long. generally takes 7-10 years

pearjuice 4y ago

Any ideas about acquisition cost? How do you value a FOSS project?

wahnfrieden 4y ago
talent hires + brand trademark
tbeseda 4y ago
GitHub star count /s

jspash 4y ago

There seems to be a disconnect between what Shopify do internally and what they ask of their users. With Hydrogen and now Remix you would think they have their sh*t together. But when the official docs recommend that you inline jquery click handlers for a simple adjustment to their shop, I just don't know what to think. All in all the Shopify dev experience for me is on par with Wordpress. I hold my nose and cash the cheques. Then hurriedly leave the premises in a long trench coat with my hat pulled down to avoid being recognised.

theturtletalks 4y ago
They have a perfectly good Storefront API that allows you to build any storefront. We use Shopify with Next.js and if we ever wanted to switch platforms, we would just change the API calls and keep the same frontend.
dmix 4y ago
There's often a disconnect between the technical staff who write customer-facing documentation vs the backend engineering teams. Often the technical writers will be working closely with real customers. The customers will come to them 90% of the time with hacky custom jQuery stores + the support staff won't be highly skilled Front-end engineers (usually a junior-dev grasp of JS/web dev).
- leviathant 4y ago
  Shopify likes to brag about having 4,000 developers. Given the output of the company - that comes across to me as bloat.
  - dewey 4y ago
    Judging the visible output as a metric for how many developers a company needs is very naive. Think about the teams that don't directly interact with the outside like infrastructure, business intelligence, hiring (onboarding tools), internal tooling, all the work they do on Ruby (https://shopify.engineering/shopify-ruby-at-scale-research-investment https://shopify.engineering/shopify-ruby-at-scale-research-i...).

whalesalad 4y ago

we buyin frameworks now

super256 4y ago
Anyone remembers that upon Remix' initial release, one had to buy a licence for 250 USD? https://web.archive.org/web/20201204025307/https://remix.run/buy https://web.archive.org/web/20201204025307/https://remix.run...
- PKop 4y ago
  So what? This is akin to crowdfunding, or patronage. Many people were happy to have early access while supporting the project.
  - super256 4y ago
    I just wanted to post this here because I think it's an interesting piece of trivia.
- esprehn 4y ago
  Michael and Ryan have always been about trying to make money from their React expertise. They literally created a company called React Training: https://reacttraining.com/team https://reacttraining.com/team and have had a fairly lucrative business doing workshops for years. No harm in trying to get folks to pay for a framework. It doesn't seem it worked, but I can't fault them for trying!
  - zwily 4y ago
    React Training worked really well, was very profitable till Covid shut it down. Obviously not a scalable startup type thing but still a nice little business.
  - jholman 4y ago
    Apropos of which, it always baffled me how bad the React Router documentation was, given that the company name was react-training. It was like an anti-ad.

colinramsay 4y ago

I'm not sure how to feel about this, but my main wish for Remix is a public roadmap and full development in the open. There is overlap but also healthy competition between it and NextJS, and I'm really interested to see where Remix goes next.

PKop 4y ago
.
- nathancahill 4y ago
  I read the opposite. There currently isn't, so it will be Ryan's #1 focus.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

tfsh 4y ago

the https://remix.run https://remix.run website is beautifully fun. I know lots of people will berate it for being OTT, but scrolling I wouldn't say is a critical path given the docs/get-started call to actions. I'd be interested to see what Shopify do with remix, are they more interested in the core team, maintaining remix.run as they plan to/do(?) use it internally. I assume they want to offer this framework as a baked in enhancement of Hydrogen[1] to try and help clients build more robust sites. 1: https://hydrogen.shopify.dev https://hydrogen.shopify.dev

robertlagrant 4y ago
It is fun! The Windows crash screen made me laugh.
yen223 4y ago
I really like the website. I think it did a great job at telling us why we should care about Remix the framework, what problem it was designed to solve. A lot of websites for other OSS projects struggle with this.

Zealotux 4y ago

Congratulations! I was keeping an eye on this project for production use, and this news is boosting my confidence.

alberth 4y ago

Why acquire something that is MIT licensed? Is this really just a talent acquisition? https://github.com/remix-run/remix https://github.com/remix-run/remix

marstall 4y ago
that was my thought. an acqhire glammed up. from what I can tell remix isn't generating much heat.
mdasen 4y ago
I wouldn't really call it a talent acquisition. It's more the same reason that any company pays people to work on open source projects. For example, Google pays people to make Flutter and Dart. Are those employees a "talent acquisition"? Clearly no because they started the project within Google. So then why is Google paying people to work on some MIT licensed thing? Well, it gives them a high-quality bit of code to build the things that are actually their business and it gives them a certain amount of control over the direction and priorities of the project. Let's say that I make a library X that your company uses. You can use X for free so why acquire X? Well, if X is a project of your company, that can give your company positive reputational benefits by association. You can set the priorities and roadmap of X. I'd be working at your company so I'd be there to help other developers. I'd see the friction you had in your environment and want to remove that friction. I'm not saying that the owner of an MIT licensed project can do anything they want. There's always the possibility of forks. However, there is still a certain amount of control. For example, Google's control of Go basically meant that they controlled the decision to go with a non-copying garbage collector because that was what would be best for Google and its codebase (and most people wouldn't care about the trade-offs that much). I think it's more than just "here are some smart people we can acquihire." I think it gives them influence over a project they might see as important.

lairv 4y ago

Aren't Remix and Hydrogen supposed to fill the same role ? Despite what Remix's creators try to argue, for me Remix is great for low interactivity website like e-commerce website, even doing a simple client-side request without refresh is a pain in Remix

jplhomer 4y ago
We'll be redesigning Hydrogen to be powered by Remix: https://hydrogen.shopify.dev/roadmap/ https://hydrogen.shopify.dev/roadmap/

asim 4y ago

Didn't Remix raise funding? Trying to read between the lines here. No appetite to raise further funding? Too much competition? Just curious.

PhoenixReborn 4y ago
They did raise funding. It's unclear to me what their business model would have been (compete with Vercel?), and maybe the struggle to find one was why they decided to go for an acquisition.
- zebnyc 4y ago
  I remember they had a really expensive subscription model (even for solo developers). They were looking to get traction based on the reputation of the founders and other tech influencers (like Kent C Dodds) in the react community. Personally I felt that they were not very clear on who their target audience was and what was the niche that they were trying to address to transition from good to great dev experience.
  - bredren 4y ago
    >They were looking to get traction based on the reputation of the founders and other tech influencers (like Kent C Dodds) in the react community. This had the opposite effect for me. I bought Dodds' Epic React course and it seemed to have been kicked to the curb in favor of joining and boosting Remix. I remember some important course updates were pending, and seemed to come to a standstill while his entire blog was re-written in Remix. Then a month or so later he joined that team. I really liked his prior educational content, in this it seemed like paid promotion for a particular framework. The VC raise and bringing Dodds on seemed like peak (hopefully!) hypecycle for frontend JS stuff.

rglover 4y ago

I'm always accepting refugees [1]. [1] https://github.com/cheatcode/joystick https://github.com/cheatcode/joystick

Existenceblinks 4y ago

I have strange feeling about these nodejs server based and the direction of the web and the chaotic of Big|VC-backed corps playing chess. And that also causes effect on web job market. .. what's your retirement plan?

woutr_be 4y ago
In what sense would this change anything to the job market or your retirement plans? Hasn't the web always gone through changes, were people had to adjust? Software development has always been (in my opinion) an ever changing environment, where you had to adjust your skill set in order to keep up. Sure some technologies change faster than others, and it's not always the right choices being made, and maybe people jump on these new technologies rather quickly, but people innovating, and learning from failures should be a good thing.

Toine 4y ago

I'll stick to NextJS. Remix seemed fishy from the very start.

Aeolun 4y ago
I share your feeling, but I don’t think it’s reasonable. I’ve used both now and it’s just fine as a framework. Maybe it’s in the way they present themselves.
- phgn 4y ago
  Definitely it's how Remix presents itself. Their landing page reads like a marketing pitch by some crazy startup looking to raise money, not like a stable library to build a product on. You have to scroll quite far to get any factual information on what differentiates it from Next.js. I quote: > Focused on web standards and modern web app UX, you’re simply going to build better websites
  - slimebot80 4y ago
    Would NextJS's Apple-style marketing pitch at their events be more convincing to you?
    - phgn 4y ago
      No, I'm also not following the latest Vercel news. It feels way too corporate.
kylehotchkiss 4y ago
To me, Remix seemed like a very lightweight reimagining of what Next excelled at (server side react with nice frontend integration). It was exciting to see how quickly it handled dynamic renders when running from a Cloudflare worker. But now that Next 13 has layouts/server components, I prefer Next.js' approach due to all the other performance work they've done with images, fonts, css, etc. One thing about Remix that always confused me was the very close ties to react router. It seemed like a distinct and unrelated concept to me, and the continued association seemed like a distraction from Remix's potential to be a stronger competitor to NextJS in the long run

emadabdulrahim 4y ago

This is huge. Remix is my favorite React framework at the moment. It is by far the best abstraction I've seen of client/server model. Their API abstraction layer is just right, working with native browser and nodejs APIs, not obscure them. Typescript support is amazing. I'd bet my money on Remix model and direction vs Nextjs

evtothedev 4y ago
> I'd bet my money on Remix model and direction vs Nextjs With Nextjs 13, the patterns are actually kind of converge. See this whole thread from Ryan at Remix with his thoughts on it: https://twitter.com/ryanflorence/status/1586820806625046529 https://twitter.com/ryanflorence/status/1586820806625046529
- rektide 4y ago
  this drive to remake runat="server" worries me. i get the good intrnt to make pages fast, but making thin client pages like this radically reduces the general utility & agency of the web. good discussion. still a worrying world to me.
  - RussianCow 4y ago
    > i get the good intrnt to make pages fast, but making thin client pages like this radically reduces the general utility & agency of the web. I'm not sure what you mean by this. Remix and related technologies don't limit what you can do on the client—you still have the full power of React at your fingertips. The difference is that they blur the lines between client and server such that you get more or less seamless server-side rendering in order to populate a web page before you hydrate it client-side with React. If anything, Remix allows you to use React for more use cases where it otherwise would not have been the right tool.
    - rektide 4y ago
      a developr can limit the power of user-agency by moving increasing amounts of power to the server. this trend amplifies developers potential. and it allows targetting "dumber" web clients. yay, good things. but it also makes the most advanced & competent web users less able & less capable. web apps have, for a while now, been fairly client-heavy, in a way that enables hacking & creativity. i'd love a strong counter-thesis for why this isn't the case, but this feels like a mainframization of computing, a push towards centralized control. it has upsides, as you point out, but also it keeps much more reserved & controlled & hidden. that is not very "web" like, tbh.

emptysea 4y ago

I’m curious if remix will remain general purpose or if it will gradually drift into just being used for Shopify things.

jacquesc 4y ago

Anyone currently using Remix in a production app? Read through the docs and it seems pretty interesting. Can't really get a sense for how stable it is though. I know from prior use of React Router, the maintainers love the big rewrites between major version numbers.

Existenceblinks 4y ago
Mix feeling of this Correlation: React Router -> Remix Redux -> RSC Snowpack -> Astro "This time, we will make it right" kind of feeling.
- roryokane 4y ago
  What’s RSC? Edit – I think I found it: RSC is React Server Components. Per React’s December 2020 blog post https://reactjs.org/blog/2020/12/21/data-fetching-with-react-server-components.html https://reactjs.org/blog/2020/12/21/data-fetching-with-react... and June 2022 blog post https://reactjs.org/blog/2022/06/15/react-labs-what-we-have-been-working-on-june-2022.html https://reactjs.org/blog/2022/06/15/react-labs-what-we-have-..., the technology is still in development. Searches like “RSC JavaScript” and “RSC Redux” didn’t turn up anything. I only found the term “React Server Components” in the comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29994621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29994621 while reading discussion of a January 2022 blog post “Remix vs Next.js”.
  - Existenceblinks 4y ago
    I hear. There's quite many kool-aid words in this area, that keeps coming up. "Island", "partial hydration", "isomorphic", without given context it's just non-sense. Even experienced developers hearing "SSR" would wonder .. wait what, why are you bringing up this obvious "server-sided rendering" .. turns out javascript folks treat it like something no one haven't ever done before. It's all confusing.
colinramsay 4y ago
Yes. The use of loaders and actions blurs the lines between client and server. It's really productive. There are a few gaps that need filling, one that comes to mind is internationalisation [1] I am very surprised that NextJS has left it so long to consider mutations - they're apparently coming up with an RFC on that but it seems to be somewhat behind closed doors. [1] https://github.com/remix-run/remix/discussions/2877 https://github.com/remix-run/remix/discussions/2877

lloydatkinson 4y ago

Wow. With the recent remix drama this is an interesting development.

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 4y ago
Which one more specifically? :)
thangngoc89 4y ago
I don't follow discord or their github's repo, just reading release notices so could you please elaborate?
- lloydatkinson 4y ago
  One of the main authors tweeted a bunch of crap about numerous other frameworks and then delete it a few hours later

nell 4y ago

~No they aren't rebuilding Hydrogen in Remix.~ Edit: Spoke too soon on the above, sorry. Remix raised funding. Ran out of money with no scope to self sustain or raise money. They downsized (see Kent Dodds. Perhaps there are others). Strong engineers that built the platform got acquihired.

eatonphil 4y ago
> No they aren't rebuilding Hydrogen in Remix. Looks like they are. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33407274 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33407274

dyeje 4y ago

Is Shopify shifting away from Rails?

tekbog 4y ago
This is something I'd like to know as well and nobody is talking about it, weird.
- fuzzygroup 4y ago
  Amen!
- Existenceblinks 4y ago
  Remember the whining people don't take action .. but the guys who have been silent all along quit .. suddenly shocking everyone? They will keep saying everything is going great!
theklr 4y ago
Probably not, but going where the market is in terms of business. Majority of their headless support is for react so investing in the stack allows them to expand and dictate that future. (Ancedata: did headless Shopify with ember and was aggravated in how piss poor their js support was in relation to React until their dev team told the data).
kylehotchkiss 4y ago
Shopify has a nice GraphQL API that can be used to build JS frontends: https://github.com/Shopify/quilt/tree/main/packages/react-graphql https://github.com/Shopify/quilt/tree/main/packages/react-gr... I imagine that paired with Remix it'd be easy and fun to build shops. It doesn't have to replace rails in that regard.
ecshafer 4y ago
We use a lot of React at Shopify on top of Rails, along with Go and Rust for critical performance systems on the backend.

orliesaurus 4y ago

I never used Remix, why is it worth it investing in Remix?

Scarbutt 4y ago
It's just an optimization to make your react pages load faster.
vosper 4y ago
Having used both, if you already know NextJS well then I wouldn't bother switching to Remix. If you want some of the Remixy API-niceness in NextJS land then you can use tRPC (for example, there are probably other options). Nothing against Remix, I do like it, it just isn't differentiated enough from NextJS to both switching for me - yet, at least.
- elevaet 4y ago
  And what about if you've not used either framework before but would like to try one? Which one would you recommend?
  - vosper 4y ago
    For work: NextJS, because Remix's future is now a little less clear. Also, there's 10x the help and documentation for NextJS. NextJS is where the mindshare is, for better or worse. For fun: Whichever appeals to you :)
threatofrain 4y ago
With the recent updates to Next there isn't enough differentiation between the two IMO. Given that Next has huge buy-in from the JS ecosystem, choosing Next is a better bet. If Next had come out with their new updates a few months ago then I wouldn't have picked Remix. I don't regret using Remix as I just wanted React Router + easy SSR, but it's also because of this that it wasn't very differentiated.

ComputerGuru 4y ago

remix feels like the react version of htmx. I'd just use the latter, tbh.

exogen 4y ago
I suspect you are confused about what Remix is, unless I vastly misunderstand htmx. By example, a request comes into my app's web server at `/posts/123`: how would htmx be involved at all in (1) understanding the request, and (2) generating the response? Remix isn't just client-side, it's also a server with routing and SSR.
- ComputerGuru 4y ago
  Yes, the routing part isn’t covered by stock htmx but it can be shimmed server-side or client-side. The more “fundamental” bit as I understand it is that each logical/visible component is served by the server-side in a remix app as a separate, fully-rendered html component, instead of needing to render the entirety of the response to effectively obtain just a part of the view. Htmx provides that bit of the puzzle lending the remix-like aspect to a traditional server-side app.

kkielhofner 4y ago

Interesting development. If I were to guess who would acquire (acquihire?) Remix I would have said Cloudflare.

youngtaff 4y ago
Cloudflare acquihired the Linc team a while back

tasubotadas 4y ago

How does remix compare to nextjs?

krtscrum 4y ago
https://remix.run/blog/remix-vs-next https://remix.run/blog/remix-vs-next
megaman821 4y ago
Remix looks like a standard server rendered web framework (like Rails or Django) except that is use React for its template language, and React has the advantage of running interactively on the client-side. NextJS pre-generates (or generates on a trigger) most its pages. Like Remix it also uses React as its template language and client-side interactivity.

wizwit999 4y ago

Everyone raised seed funding recently, I wonder what was even their idea of monetization.

SevenNation 4y ago

This post is puzzling: 1. Michael Jackson tags himself as "Co-founder, CEO." 2. Remix website gives no indication that it's a company or that there is a company called "Remix." What's going on here? What exactly what "acquired?"

dheera 4y ago

How do you acquire a framework? Why not just use it? It's not like there are physicists trying to acquire Dirac notation.

airstrike 4y ago

This is likely a better link: https://shopify.engineering/remix-joins-shopify https://shopify.engineering/remix-joins-shopify

interstice 4y ago

Having built a number of headless Shopify sites in Next JS this is slightly concerning, I was imagining a port over to Hydrogen at some later date with minimal changes rather than a total replatform. Of course a replatform wouldn't be necessary if Shopify would help out by - for example - not force logging out (and otherwise breaking checkout) for users that came from a headless store.

lirbank 4y ago

Is this really a good thing though? Sounds a bit more like a soft landing than a success story. I am not sure this is in the interest for the framework either. Michael and Ryan will stay for two years until their lockin is over and then resign and start building the next thing (a good thing).

lirbank 4y ago

Also, why did Kent C Dodds leave a while ago? I mean, not the official story, but the actual one? He became a co-founder and left within a year...

qudat 4y ago
My guess is there's way more money in his educational endeavors
- lirbank 4y ago
  That implies he considered Remix a failure and left. Interesting.
  - utahthrowaway28 4y ago
    I doubt it. Honestly I suspect he saw more money in building content that he owned 100% based on his personal brand, whereas contributing to a project that he only owned a fraction of wasn’t up his alley.
    - lirbank 4y ago
      He is a co-founder so I would believe he had more than a fraction of (unvested) stonks. A co-founder that left within a year, and prolly dropped all his shares (cliff, again my assumption).
utahthrowaway28 4y ago
I don’t know the exact details of why he left, but I can say that a lot of us were surprised and confused when he joined Remix. The other Remix founders have great reputations everywhere they’ve worked, but Kent has kind of developed into a personality cult over the years. His courses and personal brand have no doubt been very profitable for him, so I’m not too surprised to see him go back toward personal brand building and trying to increase the reach of his courses. I have a lot of respect for education initiatives and efforts to create educational content, but I’ve also had to do a lot of “deprogramming” of juniors who consumed a lot of Kent C Dodds material and end up trying to overengineer everything. He also had an expensive React testing course a couple years ago that was really disappointing, which burned a lot of goodwill among the community.

cutler 4y ago

Does this presage the eventual end of Rails at Shopify?

deleted 4y ago
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royletron 4y ago

Is it me or is Remix sort of a weird, and slightly sketchy flip of the OSS money making pipe? I understand that people can take open source projects and turn a business around them by providing hosting (Vercel/Next for example), but having people 'invest' in an open source framework just seems fundamentally wrong. What is the payout for those investors, what have Shopify actually given (and to whom) for what it has 'aquired' here? Also what of the $3m Remix 'raised' last October, where has that gone, what did those people get in return? I just fail to see where the return is on all of this...

lewisflude 4y ago
The remix team own the name, and npm package distribution rights. The money is used to fund development. I think you've got some good points here around the weirdness that happens when someone builds a business around something that is fundamentally open. In theory, someone could hard fork remix, rename it and do their own thing. The moat they've built is around the specific team working on remix, the remix community, the remix name, npm distribution rights etc. The "return" for investors will probably come in the form of selling highly integrated services (like vercel). But right now it seems to be mostly about growing remix to a critical mass. As a user, I've really enjoyed building projects with remix and I think they've built a solid community. Good article you might find interesting: https://robertcooper.me/post/reflecting-on-remix-open-source-investor-funding https://robertcooper.me/post/reflecting-on-remix-open-source...
- royletron 4y ago
  This is great, thanks for the link. I suppose I just find it strange that they haven't yet suggested what the revenue generation is for them as a whole. I only say this anecdotally, but I am pretty certain Next/Vercel/Zeit, Deno, Gatsby and Apollo all fired off their funding based on the revenue generation from their companion commercial offerings - and funding was for the revenue generating parts not specifically the OSS. As for Remix as a whole, I'd be interested in hearing more opinion on what makes it successful? Right now I am totally invested/obsessed in Next, tRPC & Prisma as our stack of choice!

sixbrx 4y ago

I've settled on using Java for backends since it's just so robust and performant. But damn if this new round of TS-enabled frameworks (Remix, Next, SvelteKit, QwikCity etc) isn't compelling with their full-stack type safety and easy development. Using same component-oriented vocabulary to seamlessly switch between and even combine client and server rendering, and co-locating client code with data loading all in TS with end to end type safety, is hard to beat. Makes me worry about being left out with non-TS backend like Java. Interested to see how this develops.

spinlock 4y ago

As someone who started off in Ember and then began developing in React: I've never liked React Router. IMO, the url is best treated as data because it doesn't work well as part of the presentation layer. The interesting part (for me) is that I'm pretty locked into React because of Shopify's Polaris project.

aatd86 4y ago
Just curious. What do you mean by the URL is best treated as data and what does remix do instead? Disclaimer: I'm building a non-js frontend framework and for me the URL is a serialized representation of Application state modulo runtime data.

deevus 4y ago

We're having massive issues with Shopify at the moment. They decided that for us to integrate with them, we HAVE TO use Shopify's billing system. We had been using them with an unlisted app for a long time and our mutual customers loved it. Recently Shopify decided to cut off our unlisted app (or whatever they call it) so that our users can no longer connect to Shopify. The only way we can get verified is to use their billing (we're using Stripe).