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hey hn, supabase ceo here the Val Town team were kind enough to share this article with me before they released it. Perhaps you know from previous HN threads t
by kiwicopple 3y ago
hey hn, supabase ceo here
the Val Town team were kind enough to share this article with me before they released it. Perhaps you know from previous HN threads that we take customer feedback very seriously. Hearing feedback like this is hard. Clearly the team at Val Town wanted Supabase to be great and we didn’t meet their expectations. For me personally, that hurts. A few quick comments
1. Modifying the database in production: I’ve published a doc on Maturity Models[0]. Hopefully this makes it clear that developers should be using Migrations once their project is live (not using the Dashboard to modify their database live). It also highlights the options for managing dev/local environments. This is just a start. We’re building Preview Databases into the native workflow so that developers don’t need to think about this.
2. Designing for Supabase: Our goal is to make all of Postgres easy, not obligatory. I’ve added a paragraph[1] in the first page in our Docs highlighting that it’s not always a good idea to go all-in on Postgres. We’ll add examples to our docs with “traditional” approaches like Node + Supabase, Rails + Supabase, etc. There are a lot of companies using this approach already, but our docs are overly focused on “the Supabase way” of doing things. There shouldn’t be a reason to switch from Supabase to any other Postgres provider if you want “plain Postgres”.
3. That said, we also want to continue making “all of Postgres” easy to use. We’re committed to building an amazing CLI experience. Like any tech, we’re going to need a few iterations. W’re building tooling for debugging and observability. We have index advisors coming[2]. We recently added Open Telemetry to Logflare[3] and added logging for local development[4]. We’re making platform usage incredibly clear[5]. We aim to make your database indestructible - we care about resilience as much as experience and we’ll make sure we highlight that in future product announcements.
I’ll finish with something that I think we did well: migrating away from Supabase was easy for Val Town, because it’s just Postgres. This is one of our core principles, “everything is portable” (https://supabase.com/docs/guides/getting-started/architecture#everything-is-portable https://supabase.com/docs/guides/getting-started/architectur...). Portability forces us compete on experience. We aim to be the best Postgres hosting service in the world, and we’ll continue to focus on that goal even if we’re not there yet.
[0] Maturity models: https://supabase.com/docs/guides/platform/maturity-model https://supabase.com/docs/guides/platform/maturity-model
[1] Choose your comfort level: https://supabase.com/docs/guides/getting-started/architecture#choose-your-comfort-level https://supabase.com/docs/guides/getting-started/architectur...
[2] Index advisor: https://database.dev/olirice/index_advisor https://database.dev/olirice/index_advisor
[3] Open Telemetry: https://github.com/Logflare/logflare/pull/1466 https://github.com/Logflare/logflare/pull/1466
[4] Local logging: https://supabase.com/blog/supabase-logs-self-hosted https://supabase.com/blog/supabase-logs-self-hosted
[5] Usage: https://twitter.com/kiwicopple/status/1658683758718124032?s=20 https://twitter.com/kiwicopple/status/1658683758718124032?s=...
- primitivesuave 3y agoLet me just say that (for me) Supabase is one of the most exciting startups of the past couple years and I'm sure these issues will get ironed out eventually. I believe in your overall mission and am inspired by how much progress you all have made in just three years.
- tr3ntg 3y agoAppreciate this well-thought out response. As someone who has built several proof-of-concepts on Supabase (but never going far enough to test its limits), articles by Val Town here and responses like yours all work towards my analysis of the platform for future projects. It's funny that threads like these bring up comments like "Well I use XYZ and it solves all of my problems." As if a one-time mention of a new PaaS is enough to bank on it for future projects. Although I can't lie - I do bookmark every PaaS that I see mentioned on HN. Regardless, I'd much rather put my faith in a platform like SB that has been battle-tested in public, even if it doesn't work out perfectly every time. Always glad to see you and the team showing up for the discussions and improving SB.
- refulgentis 3y ago+1, paradoxically, I’m even more likely to use supabase after this. Really thoughtful
- solarkraft 3y agoNot paradoxical at all. They're clearly interested in competing fairly instead of locking you in. That's a big advantage. They're also critically evaluating their approach. Exactly what I as a customer would want!
- crooked-v 3y agoI feel like the issue with the Supabase dashboard and database modification is more one of your general approach. You put editing stuff all right up front when at best it should just be an emergency hatch, and the only place to find info on migrations is by going and looking around in the docs.