
Tiny Acquires Meteor - doppp
https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/02/tiny-acquires-meteor/
======
ojschwa
Meteor was/and is a fantastic community of very generous JavaScript
developers. This is great news.

When it arrived and so important to me professionally. I used it to build my
first web apps. I can't tell you how many times I struggled to get started
with Rails, Meteor was a foothold beyond compare, they were incredibly focused
on keeping the stack accessible to beginners.

They had free command line deployments – meant I could ship projects to
friends, before I knew anything about hosting a web server, which was so
exciting and really kept me motivated.

The way I do full-stack now, with declarative UI, apollo, Node.js – it's all
pretty much the same idea as Meteor apps, just with even bigger communities
that really out competed the meteor strack. You could say they're victims of
JS explosion/success.

Now I have fantastic job as a full-stack dev, and I doubt I would of made it
without Meteor and Discover Meteor PDF. So many cool projects like Apollo, Vue
and Storybook came from people involved in the Meteor community.

There's still a huge gap in making accessible full-stack frameworks for web
apps. This project is worth a look
[https://github.com/VulcanJS/Vulcan](https://github.com/VulcanJS/Vulcan) if
you know I mean.

~~~
seanbarry
I'm in exactly the same position as you. I was overwhelmed with building web
applications (coming from a self taught design and then web development
background). I found Meteor and quickly started building increasingly complex
applications (without having to learn things like webpack etc).

Now, a good few years later I'm a full stack developer with a great job
building some really cool and cutting edge software. I've learned all the
things that Meteor did for me, but I wouldn't have got here without it.

I really think that with the right decisions, Meteor can rise to be a top tier
JS framework. Very hopeful to see where it goes.

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kall
It is part of the article but in case anyone else is mainly wondering about
it:

This doesn't include Apollo (the GraphQL tools).

Seems like this is maybe Apollo "shedding" it's older, non-related parts. As a
user of a technology, aquisitions usually sound like bad news, but the pitch /
website of tiny ([https://www.tinycapital.com](https://www.tinycapital.com))
sounds refreshingly straightforward. Seems like this kind of shedding, without
screwing over your users, is exactly what they focus on.

~~~
futhey
Arguably Apollo being framework-agnostic is the best outcome for both.

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crabtree123
I am a part of a team that uses Meteor in production. We’ve seen that their
DDP / reactivity primitives require thought and effort to scale correctly, but
they definitely do scale gracefully. And having a UI automatically respond to
data changes in mongo can be quite valuable for the right applications.

Like everything in engineering: trade-offs abound. With meteor and the Meteor
Guide pattern book, you get a very standardized set of software modules (user
authentication, roles, schema enforcement, etc) that cover the entirety of
what’s required to maintain a modern, production web application, and all the
modules are guaranteed to work well together. But on the flipside: there is
far less to choose. It is convention over configuration, to the extreme.

There was a time in my career when I would have appreciated more
configuration, but — not entirely sure why — I now get negative joy from that
part of the process. For me, Meteor allows me to focus exclusively on the
value producing part of the job: the app itself (vs tooling). Fingers crossed
that the Tiny team keeps this great system on a path forward!

------
commoner
While Meteor didn't end up being as successful as it could have been, I'm
thankful for these two open source applications that were built on Meteor:

Wekan, a self-hosted kanban board similar to Trello:
[https://github.com/wekan/wekan](https://github.com/wekan/wekan)

Rocket.Chat, a team chat platform similar to Slack:
[https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat](https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat)

These two applications made good use of Meteor's reactive capabilities.

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steve_adams_86
Neat, I've been following Tiny and Meteor for years and I didn't see this
coming at all. My first (and one of very few) blog post was about Meteor [1].
It got a stunning number of visits (by my standards) and at the time I thought
Meteor was going to have major traction if I was seeing so much traffic. In
retrospect it was probably more so that I was one of few people who wrote
about customizing authentication at the time, and it was something I had to do
on most projects I built in Meteor. I'm guessing others did too.

I very quickly lost interest in Meteor because it seemed so efficient for very
basic applications, but ridiculously inefficient for heavily custom logical
and ux flows. That's usually what I needed to build. I've come to dislike
intimately learning my frameworks' guts - it suggests to me they could be too
complex, and there's too much potential for technical debt from working around
things. I think it's important to know how your framework works, but... There
are limitations to how deeply I want to know these things.

I'm curious to see where this goes, anyway. I feel like I should give Meteor
another chance soon.

1\. [http://steve-adams.me/practical-examples-of-
authentication-i...](http://steve-adams.me/practical-examples-of-
authentication-in-meteor-1-0/)

------
Deimorz
Official blog post: [https://blog.meteor.com/a-new-chapter-for-
meteor-7b684320be4...](https://blog.meteor.com/a-new-chapter-for-
meteor-7b684320be4c)

~~~
simonw
It says "a transition in project leadership including a new CEO" \- but unless
I've missed something it doesn't say who the new CEO is going to be?

------
Touche
Is Apollo making money? If so, how? Did Meteor make money? If so, how?

~~~
dntrkv
They make money from Apollo Engine, which I think is now called Apollo
Platform.

Edit: Looks like it's called Graph Manager now:
[https://www.apollographql.com/docs/graph-
manager/](https://www.apollographql.com/docs/graph-manager/)

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
I still don't understand where the money exchanges hands, here. To my
understanding, GraphQL is just a query specification. If the money is in
hosting, and it becomes moderately successful, they risk becoming Amazon'd.

~~~
kabes
Amazon already has a product based off Apollo. But MDG makes money of apollo
by selling graphql monitoring and analytic tools for your Apollo apps.

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kabes
I wonder what this sale means. It's MIT licensed, so they're just buying the
brand name? Is a development team (mostly just benjamin newman these days)
moving with it? Benjamin has been absolutely fundamental for Meteor and I
think the success of this acquisition largely depends on what he will do.

~~~
tth3uoku
Benjamin has announced he will continue to work for Apollo and not be joining
the Tiny team [1]. [1] [https://forums.meteor.com/t/some-exciting-meteor-
news/50313/...](https://forums.meteor.com/t/some-exciting-meteor-
news/50313/13)

------
boringg
Title reads like David just bought Goliath :)

------
pbreit
Anyone use meteor? Seems like it got steamrolled by npm, react, mongo. Going
your own way on each component doesn’t seem like the best strategy.

~~~
nstart
Used meteor to try and build a production ready project management app in a
company I was employed at years ago. We never got it off the ground and this
is one of those rare times that technology was the direct reason we couldn't
make the product work.

Meteor was great for quick and dirty apps but beyond that meteor never made it
past the feeling that it was a prototype itself.

Everything about data management was painful the moment you started to deal
with production related use cases. Unrelated changes to nested fields would
propagate changes up the chain which would in turn trigger data refreshes of
entire collections. And the documentation never helped here. The documentation
was only about the minimum needed to perform a task, but for all their talk of
opinionated frameworks, the community had to come up with their own opinions
on how to actually use the framework efficiently.

Overall it was a dumpster fire but it had a positive effect on me since I was
early in my career. I learnt how to better evaluate technology to actually
understand whether the tools were truly production stable ready and more
importantly if the documentation and community were also "production ready".
So I guess I'm kind of grateful that meteor happened to me. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

~~~
petecoop
Very much agree with you on this. I picked up a live Meteor app that felt very
much like it had been built as a prototype that had been built upon into a
production app. It was a mess, it had clearly evolved over time and over
multiple Meteor releases, there was no obvious structure at all - just felt
like a bunch of files that were all loaded into some soup that became the app.

I don't think Meteor ever had decent docs on going from the prototype stage to
a fully fledged application and how you'd evolve the structure over the time.

I could name a lot of problems I've had with Meteor, and I definitely agree
with having a proper evaluation of tech before using it - knowing the limits
of the stack you choose and if it's going to lock you in in the long term.

It's felt like a framework that hasn't been given time needed recently to keep
it up to date, improving docs etc as MDG have shifted their focus on Apollo.

------
big_chungus
Am I the only one who is starting to find this sort of company names
confusing? I guessed meteor was probably meteor.js (though didn't know there
was an associated comapny), but had to think pretty hard about it first. It
was clearer when calling things "foo.com" or some such was in fashion, but not
now. Even "Meteor, Inc." would have made it clearer, but then you have to
check which legal structure a company has. There's also the question of
whether such common words in such widespread use for so long can be reasonably
trade-marked.

Another issue is odd spelling. Not here, but many valley companies will name
themselves, say, "suni" (pronounced "sunny") because that domain name is
available. Problem is, if I hear that in conversation, I will google "sunny".

The best example, of course, is the we company. Significant grammatical nail-
biting ensued when I saw repeated instances of "we is". I wonder, did Adam
Neumann consider that such a name change would lead to articles concerning his
company sounding like gollum wrote them? Joking aside, I hope people who name
such things start considering how the name will sound, write, and be perceived
by most people who read it.

~~~
jakear
By “this sort of company names” do you mean using common nouns with little to
no relation to the company’s line of business? If so, that’s not exactly new:
Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Intel, Oracle, etc.

The difference here is just that Meteor isn’t as popular as the above. But the
above weren’t popular at their origins either (with the exception of Alphabet,
perhaps).

Seems like the real issue here is that Meteor does not have instant brand name
recognition... which isn’t really an issue.

~~~
davidivadavid
Interestingly enough, Intel stands for "Integrated Electronics" (nothing to do
with Intel(ligence)).

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Chico11Kidlet
I really do hope this rejuvenates development on Meteor

------
marknadal
Hey, I've been competing against Meteor for years now
([http://gun.eco](http://gun.eco)), is this good or bad news for me? Is Meteor
going into maintenance mode / shut down or will Tiny continue to expand its
feature set?

~~~
jakear
This is good news for you... because Tiny will continue to expand its feature
set and the competition will make both platforms grow. ;)

------
markdown
The only thing I understood in the title was "Acquires". What are Tiny and
Meteor?

~~~
amanzi
It's in the first sentence of the article: "Canadian technology holding
company Tiny, home to companies like Dribble, Flow and Unicorn Hunt, today
announced that it has acquired Meteor, the JavaScript-centric open-source app
platform."

