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We started working on Hummingbird slightly over a year ago and have grown quite a bit since then. We have a total of 50,000 registered users and ~30% MAU. We d

by radq 12y ago

We started working on Hummingbird slightly over a year ago and have grown quite a bit since then. We have a total of 50,000 registered users and ~30% MAU. We decided to open-source it because we don’t always have the time we would like to work on it after putting in hours at work/school, and we had a lot of our users interested in helping out. We also found that working out in the open is a lot more fun! We have a fairly modern stack, the backend uses Rails, Postgres and Redis. Front-end is a client-side application written using Ember. (Mostly — there are legacy pages still rendered using Rails and some performance-sensitive parts that use React.) The current incumbent in this niche is a website called MyAnimeList (myanimelist.net) which has upwards of 2 million registered users. Considering it looks like it hasn’t been updated since 2005 we strongly feel this niche deserves better. Please let us know what you think!

sand500 12y ago
Out of curiosity, how would you feel if MAL used your code in updating the UI of their site?
- graphik 12y ago
  Successful. We started Hummingbird because we were very dissatisfied with the state of things in this industry. If MAL improved as a direct result of our hard work, then we're positively effecting an experience for hundreds of thousands of users. In the meantime we're going to keep innovating and working towards the platform we want to have. Now that we're open source, if we stumble or come up short, somebody else can carry on the torch. I think that's the beauty of open-source.
- u124556 12y ago
  Do they really need the code to clone the UI? I'd be more worried about the suggestion system.
- nobotty 12y ago
  hah, that would make the MAL devs competent, not going to happen
  - PLejeck 12y ago
    That would require there to actually be MAL devs. Last I heard, they're down to one guy and he's AWOL.
sparkie 12y ago
Not updating a website people use regularly is not a bad thing - people are used to the UI, and changing shit only ruins the experience when people need to re-learn how to use the damn thing. Also, it's not like MAL is "not updated", since it constantly has new content added - much of it user contributed, but those contributions get locked up behind a server, and we don't have access to it except through the website itself. I don't suppose you would be offering the ability to query data, which will inevitably be user-contributed?
- PLejeck 12y ago
  Hummingbird already offers an API through Mashape, which is infinitely more thorough than any competitor's. Additionally, MAL has lots of minor bugs, and how can you trust a site that hasn't been maintained in 5 years to store your password correctly? 2009 was a scary place. This is pure speculation, but I wouldn't be surprised if MAL is storing passwords as MD5+salt. They do just email it to you in plaintext when you register. And recovery is a 6 digit pin, which is totally plenty of entropy.
  - jhenkens 12y ago
    You register and login over HTTP. I would bet they just store it in plaintext. But does it really matter with the first piece of information, how they store your password?
    - mijoharas 12y ago
      ughhhh. I find it so hard to understand that this is still a thing that happens on the internet nowadays.
  - shaldengeki 12y ago
    I can confirm that at least as of 2012 or so they were storing passwords as a salted md5 hash. I did point out to a staff member that this was not a good idea and was brushed off, so I assume this hasn't changed since then.
adamnemecek 12y ago
What has been your experience with Ember? How would you compare it with React? I realize that they are for somewhat different purposes.
- radq 12y ago
  Ember has been amazing. It makes managing a growing application a lot easier. There was a steep learning curve for me personally, especially because at the time I was starting out the documentation wasn't very good. (It is amazing now, though!) I also like React a lot but it only deals with the view layer, it doesn't give you any structure for the bigger picture of things. I guess this is something that Flux addresses but I haven't looked into it. I did briefly look into integrating React to be used as Ember's view layer but decided to drop it since HTMLbars looked like it was around the corner (hah). It is still pretty easy to use React with Ember now, though it feels hacky because you end up having to call forceUpdate a lot. I wrote a post about how it works here: http://discuss.emberjs.com/t/can-reactjs-be-used-as-a-view-within-emberjs/3470/10 http://discuss.emberjs.com/t/can-reactjs-be-used-as-a-view-w...
newaccountfool 12y ago
You say you have 50,000 registered users. Can I ask how many visitors you receive a day? What type of server structure you have? I'm currently building a webapp and would like to know what hardware you have running it.
- graphik 12y ago
  We see around 200K uniques per month. This month will be a bit higher due to HN traffic. We're running this on a Digital Ocean droplet and AWS for our media. It's a surprisingly simple set-up, really.
- radq 12y ago
  We get between 300 and 500 rpm depending on the time of the day, all of which is served from a 8GB DO droplet running 4 Unicorn processes. Our forum (we use Discourse) also gets similar traffic, it is hosted on a 4GB droplet.
  - newaccountfool 12y ago
    Wow, here's me thinking that you would have separate servers for database and web server and load balancers. Gives me faith.
    - radq 12y ago
      We actually have the architecture in place for that, it turns out it was completely unnecessary. (See: https://github.com/hummingbird-me/ansible-deploy https://github.com/hummingbird-me/ansible-deploy) The application layer is completely horizontally scalable, all I need to do is edit the config file to add or remove servers and run ansible.
deeteecee 12y ago
regardless of the status, i will take a look and try to help since im an anime fan!

by radq 12y ago

sand500 12y ago

Out of curiosity, how would you feel if MAL used your code in updating the UI of their site?

graphik 12y ago
Successful. We started Hummingbird because we were very dissatisfied with the state of things in this industry. If MAL improved as a direct result of our hard work, then we're positively effecting an experience for hundreds of thousands of users. In the meantime we're going to keep innovating and working towards the platform we want to have. Now that we're open source, if we stumble or come up short, somebody else can carry on the torch. I think that's the beauty of open-source.
u124556 12y ago
Do they really need the code to clone the UI? I'd be more worried about the suggestion system.
nobotty 12y ago
hah, that would make the MAL devs competent, not going to happen
- PLejeck 12y ago
  That would require there to actually be MAL devs. Last I heard, they're down to one guy and he's AWOL.

sparkie 12y ago

Not updating a website people use regularly is not a bad thing - people are used to the UI, and changing shit only ruins the experience when people need to re-learn how to use the damn thing. Also, it's not like MAL is "not updated", since it constantly has new content added - much of it user contributed, but those contributions get locked up behind a server, and we don't have access to it except through the website itself. I don't suppose you would be offering the ability to query data, which will inevitably be user-contributed?

PLejeck 12y ago
Hummingbird already offers an API through Mashape, which is infinitely more thorough than any competitor's. Additionally, MAL has lots of minor bugs, and how can you trust a site that hasn't been maintained in 5 years to store your password correctly? 2009 was a scary place. This is pure speculation, but I wouldn't be surprised if MAL is storing passwords as MD5+salt. They do just email it to you in plaintext when you register. And recovery is a 6 digit pin, which is totally plenty of entropy.
- jhenkens 12y ago
  You register and login over HTTP. I would bet they just store it in plaintext. But does it really matter with the first piece of information, how they store your password?
  - mijoharas 12y ago
    ughhhh. I find it so hard to understand that this is still a thing that happens on the internet nowadays.
- shaldengeki 12y ago
  I can confirm that at least as of 2012 or so they were storing passwords as a salted md5 hash. I did point out to a staff member that this was not a good idea and was brushed off, so I assume this hasn't changed since then.

adamnemecek 12y ago

What has been your experience with Ember? How would you compare it with React? I realize that they are for somewhat different purposes.

radq 12y ago
Ember has been amazing. It makes managing a growing application a lot easier. There was a steep learning curve for me personally, especially because at the time I was starting out the documentation wasn't very good. (It is amazing now, though!) I also like React a lot but it only deals with the view layer, it doesn't give you any structure for the bigger picture of things. I guess this is something that Flux addresses but I haven't looked into it. I did briefly look into integrating React to be used as Ember's view layer but decided to drop it since HTMLbars looked like it was around the corner (hah). It is still pretty easy to use React with Ember now, though it feels hacky because you end up having to call forceUpdate a lot. I wrote a post about how it works here: http://discuss.emberjs.com/t/can-reactjs-be-used-as-a-view-within-emberjs/3470/10 http://discuss.emberjs.com/t/can-reactjs-be-used-as-a-view-w...

newaccountfool 12y ago

You say you have 50,000 registered users. Can I ask how many visitors you receive a day? What type of server structure you have? I'm currently building a webapp and would like to know what hardware you have running it.

graphik 12y ago
We see around 200K uniques per month. This month will be a bit higher due to HN traffic. We're running this on a Digital Ocean droplet and AWS for our media. It's a surprisingly simple set-up, really.
radq 12y ago
We get between 300 and 500 rpm depending on the time of the day, all of which is served from a 8GB DO droplet running 4 Unicorn processes. Our forum (we use Discourse) also gets similar traffic, it is hosted on a 4GB droplet.
- newaccountfool 12y ago
  Wow, here's me thinking that you would have separate servers for database and web server and load balancers. Gives me faith.
  - radq 12y ago
    We actually have the architecture in place for that, it turns out it was completely unnecessary. (See: https://github.com/hummingbird-me/ansible-deploy https://github.com/hummingbird-me/ansible-deploy) The application layer is completely horizontally scalable, all I need to do is edit the config file to add or remove servers and run ansible.

deeteecee 12y ago

regardless of the status, i will take a look and try to help since im an anime fan!