5 ms·

Hello Hacker News

28 points by zachinglis 13y ago

drdaeman 13y ago
> favorite frameworks like Wordpress and Drupal Cough > instead of spending between 30 minutes to 12 hours on it like you are doing right now I'd say, half an hour is awfully a lot for even for a manual provisioning with `apt-get install wordpress` or `tar xvzf wordpress*.tar`.
- zachinglis 13y ago
  Right. But most developers aren't server admins and don't want to be. I press a few buttons and a server is up and ready! :)
  - drdaeman 13y ago
    Right. And I meant, manual provisioning as the "worst" case, but even that shouldn't take 30 minutes. I vaguely remember LAMP VPS hostings from years ago, and I believe they mostly had 1-click installs for popular software. Here is a random video I've Googled up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwlNBTvFfCA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwlNBTvFfCA (2009), showing installing Wordpress from Plesk. Installation took 8 minutes even with verbose explanations for every step. How your service is different?
    - zachinglis 13y ago
      Of course. But 1 minute is better than 30, right? And then you have to maintain it.
- minimaxir 13y ago
  Relatedly, DigitalOcean has WordPress or a LAMP stack as default imaging options.
blubbi2 13y ago
I really like the idea, but please include Node.JS or Ruby.
- zachinglis 13y ago
  Being actively worked on! :)
shire 13y ago
is 2013, you would think Django and Rails would be part of this. PHP already has a ton of support on the web.
- zachinglis 13y ago
  It's part of the plan. We're working together with people like Chad Fowler to bring that to life. But this is the initial launch with a smaller offering for now.
  - shire 13y ago
    Awesome! really looking forward to it this is very useful, thanks.
IanCal 13y ago
Looks interesting! How much is this? What timescales do you charge by?
- zachinglis 13y ago
  Free for development, fixed fee per project per month for live hosting.
  - IanCal 13y ago
    Sounds good, any decision so far on the pricing per month?
    - zachinglis 13y ago
      Rather than picking a number out the air, we're going to use the next few weeks to see people's usage so we can give the fairest price for the service. We're working on what we think is the best for everyone and will announce it when we decide :)
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
saraid216 13y ago
So what is this when it's not being knocked over by the flood of HNers?
- zachinglis 13y ago
  Try again. CDN should be holding now.
rajivtiru 13y ago
I only see a 404 page
- zachinglis 13y ago
  Should be fixed now :)
danso 13y ago
I'm sorry but if you're a cloud service and you have specifically targeted a static HTML page to Hacker News, even to the point of where the title is "Hello Hacker News", you should do everything in your power, even if it means creating a special S3 bucket, to make sure it does not 404. The regular homepage still seems to work (with missing assets)...but not to sound too cranky, but it was irritating to see the claim of "10+ FRAMEWORKS" and not see the list anywhere on the site. The closest I saw to a list of these "10+ FRAMEWORKS" is waiting for the banner animation to cycle through all the PHP frameworks it supports ("Jumpstarter is an addictively fast and easy way to work with web frameworks like [wait for framework's name to fade in]") I even clicked all the links I could find. "About" goes to the staff mugshots, "Help" goes to a support center, and the Blog link goes nowhere. C'mon...
- zachinglis 13y ago
  I'm going to stick my hand up and say "My fault." We're updating the website a lot right now and it takes a little for Cloudfare to repropogate everything. About – The people are the about. We could write a story about who we are and what we do - I agree. But that's not the most important task any of us could have done. Help going to the support center is standard. Blog is being removed. Appreciate the feedback though :)
  - danso 13y ago
    Sorry, to be clear, I clicked on those links to find the 10 frameworks and any other kind of information about it as a product. Each of those links could conceivably be a place for such information
    - zachinglis 13y ago
      We will put special landing pages for each framework up eventually. But for now, everyone knows what Wordpress, etc is and what to expect within the framework. Is there any more information you'd love to know and think should be included that you're looking for now about those frameworks and what we do with them?
    - 13y ago
resu 13y ago
Once my favourite framework is installed, will you abstract out most of the common configuration / maintenance / tuning steps as well? Or will I have to ssh in and do that by hand?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- zachinglis 13y ago
  We're trying to make it as few clicks as possible. If you have any requests feel free to mention them through http://help.jumpstarter.io/ http://help.jumpstarter.io/ We're really keen on working with the community.
  - resu 13y ago
    Same for me, Page not fund. If it's clicks instead of keystrokes though, that's music to my ears!
  - Splendor 13y ago
    I'm not able to access that page. "Oops! Google Chrome could not find help.jumpstarter.io"
    - zachinglis 13y ago
      We're using Desk.com - There status page seems to suggest they had no issues. I'll have a look and see if I can locate the problem.
yajoe 13y ago
As a dev, completely get the need. Yes, most of my day-to-day job is making a small change or reproducing a bug locally, testing, and then deploying. Setting up that loop has been harder than I want to admit and is the reason I know maven, ant, chef AND puppet, Jenkins, and gradle as well as I do. In many ways I wish I didn't have to! That said, my friendly advice would be to pick one framework and environment combination and solve this problem end to end. Node would be a perfect start. Show me how to use your project to make node dev shorter and easier. If I believe you I will use you and node for new projects. I'm not going to switch an existing project to jumpstart because I've already set up the flow. Maybe I'm weird, but I demand single-command builds and deploys. All my projects already have it. But I'm willing to learn new techs to avoid the pain. I see your landing page and take away you have lofty goals and are trying to be all things to all people. Don't. Pick one. Focus. Be the best at it. Make a YouTube video that shows me how you get 1-second whatever. It's especially puzzling when you don't have a demo video but you have a produced ad on "flow." It's hard to believe your product has substance during this launch. I'm willing to switch to angular and node (or hipster.js and kitkat.io -- whatever, it doesn't really matter) to get what you advertise. For new projects. I won't touch existing stuff. It means I have to test and am likely to break something by moving to your project in prod. Nobody ever changes their build scripts!
- zachinglis 13y ago
  I totally agree. That's why the team has focused on PHP and PHP frameworks mostly for now. Getting the scripts as right as possible over the months. And we've been using respected members of the other language communities to build up the stacks. I know for someone like me I want one hosting account for everything if I can. I hate multiple accounts and it's nice to just see everything in one place.
  - yajoe 13y ago
    Totally get the strategy, though I was writing PHP apps 10 years ago... I would be hard pressed to go back, especially after having touched YII last year. PHP is legacy today, right or wrong. My point is twofold: First, it's very important to nail a trending language and framework. Right now that is a short list of Go, pure-JavaScript (firebase + angular), node, and maybe django. You are going after mindshare of hackers. You have to pick the trendy environments. The whole reason people left PHP to rails was the YouTube video where the guy typed "rails server" and magically stuff just worked. You need to do the same for the short list above. Second, you have to show the benefit of your product. Seeing is believing. Nothing else will substitute. While this is the anonymous Internet and you know nothing about me, at least do some gut checks with the current uni kids. Best of luck!
zachinglis 13y ago
The status page link is online and will track any page outages. http://jumpstarter.statuspage.io http://jumpstarter.statuspage.io
tsmith 13y ago
I was keen to understand how it works and what this "flow" thing is, as the technical premise is really quite interesting. So I click on the video... and start hearing the xylophone... and say "uh oh". Folks, I have good feelings about good tools, but I don't get them from watching videos of people talking about how they get good feelings from their tools. The promotional video has obvious high production values but lacks any description of what "flow" is/does. It is the 2010s hipster equivalent of zombo.com. Tell me what it is, what it compares to, how it's different/new/novel. Putting it politely, I place very low value in how it makes some random people "feel" or what sound effects it causes them to emit, and the fact that that comprises the sole content of the video makes the whole thing suspect.
- zachinglis 13y ago
  The idea is firstly to take the pain out of hosting, rethink a lot of things (how people collaborate, and use it - think forking and merging like Git. The idea is to help be people's tech partner as they innovate and create, taking some of the pain away and giving them more time. I hope I explained it better? :)
elmertoft 13y ago
Jumpstarter is the kind of product that just leaves people in awe. I've shown it both to developer friends and to my girlfriend and the reaction has always been the same: "How can I get an invite?". It's so nice that you're finally in Beta and that you get to show the world what you've been working on for so long. Congrats guys!

28 points by zachinglis 13y ago

> favorite frameworks like Wordpress and Drupal Cough > instead of spending between 30 minutes to 12 hours on it like you are doing right now I'd say, half an hour is awfully a lot for even for a manual provisioning with `apt-get install wordpress` or `tar xvzf wordpress*.tar`.

zachinglis 13y ago
Right. But most developers aren't server admins and don't want to be. I press a few buttons and a server is up and ready! :)
- drdaeman 13y ago
  Right. And I meant, manual provisioning as the "worst" case, but even that shouldn't take 30 minutes. I vaguely remember LAMP VPS hostings from years ago, and I believe they mostly had 1-click installs for popular software. Here is a random video I've Googled up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwlNBTvFfCA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwlNBTvFfCA (2009), showing installing Wordpress from Plesk. Installation took 8 minutes even with verbose explanations for every step. How your service is different?
  - zachinglis 13y ago
    Of course. But 1 minute is better than 30, right? And then you have to maintain it.
minimaxir 13y ago
Relatedly, DigitalOcean has WordPress or a LAMP stack as default imaging options.

blubbi2 13y ago

I really like the idea, but please include Node.JS or Ruby.

zachinglis 13y ago
Being actively worked on! :)

shire 13y ago

is 2013, you would think Django and Rails would be part of this. PHP already has a ton of support on the web.

zachinglis 13y ago
It's part of the plan. We're working together with people like Chad Fowler to bring that to life. But this is the initial launch with a smaller offering for now.
- shire 13y ago
  Awesome! really looking forward to it this is very useful, thanks.

IanCal 13y ago

Looks interesting! How much is this? What timescales do you charge by?

zachinglis 13y ago
Free for development, fixed fee per project per month for live hosting.
- IanCal 13y ago
  Sounds good, any decision so far on the pricing per month?
  - zachinglis 13y ago
    Rather than picking a number out the air, we're going to use the next few weeks to see people's usage so we can give the fairest price for the service. We're working on what we think is the best for everyone and will announce it when we decide :)

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

saraid216 13y ago

So what is this when it's not being knocked over by the flood of HNers?

zachinglis 13y ago
Try again. CDN should be holding now.

rajivtiru 13y ago

I only see a 404 page

zachinglis 13y ago
Should be fixed now :)

danso 13y ago

I'm sorry but if you're a cloud service and you have specifically targeted a static HTML page to Hacker News, even to the point of where the title is "Hello Hacker News", you should do everything in your power, even if it means creating a special S3 bucket, to make sure it does not 404. The regular homepage still seems to work (with missing assets)...but not to sound too cranky, but it was irritating to see the claim of "10+ FRAMEWORKS" and not see the list anywhere on the site. The closest I saw to a list of these "10+ FRAMEWORKS" is waiting for the banner animation to cycle through all the PHP frameworks it supports ("Jumpstarter is an addictively fast and easy way to work with web frameworks like [wait for framework's name to fade in]") I even clicked all the links I could find. "About" goes to the staff mugshots, "Help" goes to a support center, and the Blog link goes nowhere. C'mon...

zachinglis 13y ago
I'm going to stick my hand up and say "My fault." We're updating the website a lot right now and it takes a little for Cloudfare to repropogate everything. About – The people are the about. We could write a story about who we are and what we do - I agree. But that's not the most important task any of us could have done. Help going to the support center is standard. Blog is being removed. Appreciate the feedback though :)
- danso 13y ago
  Sorry, to be clear, I clicked on those links to find the 10 frameworks and any other kind of information about it as a product. Each of those links could conceivably be a place for such information
  - zachinglis 13y ago
    We will put special landing pages for each framework up eventually. But for now, everyone knows what Wordpress, etc is and what to expect within the framework. Is there any more information you'd love to know and think should be included that you're looking for now about those frameworks and what we do with them?
  - 13y ago

resu 13y ago

Once my favourite framework is installed, will you abstract out most of the common configuration / maintenance / tuning steps as well? Or will I have to ssh in and do that by hand?

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
zachinglis 13y ago
We're trying to make it as few clicks as possible. If you have any requests feel free to mention them through http://help.jumpstarter.io/ http://help.jumpstarter.io/ We're really keen on working with the community.
- resu 13y ago
  Same for me, Page not fund. If it's clicks instead of keystrokes though, that's music to my ears!
- Splendor 13y ago
  I'm not able to access that page. "Oops! Google Chrome could not find help.jumpstarter.io"
  - zachinglis 13y ago
    We're using Desk.com - There status page seems to suggest they had no issues. I'll have a look and see if I can locate the problem.

yajoe 13y ago

As a dev, completely get the need. Yes, most of my day-to-day job is making a small change or reproducing a bug locally, testing, and then deploying. Setting up that loop has been harder than I want to admit and is the reason I know maven, ant, chef AND puppet, Jenkins, and gradle as well as I do. In many ways I wish I didn't have to! That said, my friendly advice would be to pick one framework and environment combination and solve this problem end to end. Node would be a perfect start. Show me how to use your project to make node dev shorter and easier. If I believe you I will use you and node for new projects. I'm not going to switch an existing project to jumpstart because I've already set up the flow. Maybe I'm weird, but I demand single-command builds and deploys. All my projects already have it. But I'm willing to learn new techs to avoid the pain. I see your landing page and take away you have lofty goals and are trying to be all things to all people. Don't. Pick one. Focus. Be the best at it. Make a YouTube video that shows me how you get 1-second whatever. It's especially puzzling when you don't have a demo video but you have a produced ad on "flow." It's hard to believe your product has substance during this launch. I'm willing to switch to angular and node (or hipster.js and kitkat.io -- whatever, it doesn't really matter) to get what you advertise. For new projects. I won't touch existing stuff. It means I have to test and am likely to break something by moving to your project in prod. Nobody ever changes their build scripts!

zachinglis 13y ago
I totally agree. That's why the team has focused on PHP and PHP frameworks mostly for now. Getting the scripts as right as possible over the months. And we've been using respected members of the other language communities to build up the stacks. I know for someone like me I want one hosting account for everything if I can. I hate multiple accounts and it's nice to just see everything in one place.
- yajoe 13y ago
  Totally get the strategy, though I was writing PHP apps 10 years ago... I would be hard pressed to go back, especially after having touched YII last year. PHP is legacy today, right or wrong. My point is twofold: First, it's very important to nail a trending language and framework. Right now that is a short list of Go, pure-JavaScript (firebase + angular), node, and maybe django. You are going after mindshare of hackers. You have to pick the trendy environments. The whole reason people left PHP to rails was the YouTube video where the guy typed "rails server" and magically stuff just worked. You need to do the same for the short list above. Second, you have to show the benefit of your product. Seeing is believing. Nothing else will substitute. While this is the anonymous Internet and you know nothing about me, at least do some gut checks with the current uni kids. Best of luck!

zachinglis 13y ago

The status page link is online and will track any page outages. http://jumpstarter.statuspage.io http://jumpstarter.statuspage.io

tsmith 13y ago

I was keen to understand how it works and what this "flow" thing is, as the technical premise is really quite interesting. So I click on the video... and start hearing the xylophone... and say "uh oh". Folks, I have good feelings about good tools, but I don't get them from watching videos of people talking about how they get good feelings from their tools. The promotional video has obvious high production values but lacks any description of what "flow" is/does. It is the 2010s hipster equivalent of zombo.com. Tell me what it is, what it compares to, how it's different/new/novel. Putting it politely, I place very low value in how it makes some random people "feel" or what sound effects it causes them to emit, and the fact that that comprises the sole content of the video makes the whole thing suspect.

zachinglis 13y ago
The idea is firstly to take the pain out of hosting, rethink a lot of things (how people collaborate, and use it - think forking and merging like Git. The idea is to help be people's tech partner as they innovate and create, taking some of the pain away and giving them more time. I hope I explained it better? :)

elmertoft 13y ago

Jumpstarter is the kind of product that just leaves people in awe. I've shown it both to developer friends and to my girlfriend and the reaction has always been the same: "How can I get an invite?". It's so nice that you're finally in Beta and that you get to show the world what you've been working on for so long. Congrats guys!