Hi there - founder here! Happy to answer questions.
By building "imaginary prototypes" of these YC companies in an hour or two, we're not trying to minimise how hard it is to start a business like this. But the hard part of starting (eg) Meter Feeder should be selling the service to local governments, not wrangling the ~5 programming languages and 3-4 frameworks you need for the modern Web. We eventually got fed up of ranting online about it, and decided to do something about the problem. Anvil was the result :)
(Edited to add: We're hiring! If you're in the UK and this floats your boat, check out https://anvil.works/jobs)
I have a feeling that the trend you're tapping into here is going to accelerate, but I'm not positive.
I see a trend forming where the stacks are getting too brittle, complex and overweight at all levels. I think it might be a result of trying to keep pace with constant change. There has been very little period of exnovation but huge amounts of innovation... perhaps at a cost.
A certain category of developer is suffering fatigue. People want to focus on their business more than the technology. They want to spend more resources on advanced technology like machine learning and analytics than the transactional CRUD/user interfaces. They want to apply technology holistically and stop worrying about the details (e.g. moving to cloud platforms).
For that matter, I see a lot of people trying to apply advanced tech thinking it will alleviate or continue to greatly reduce the need for human input and interaction. Most of the energy I see being expended out there is being spent on advancing tech at a blistering pace more than streamling/simplifying/solidifying ergonomics of development. There isn't a huge focus on ease of long term support.
If the trend continues and tech continues to advance at a mad pace, I think more and more people are going to want to outsource the problem of keeping up so they can just easily build what they need and hopefully this time it will scale further than previous attempts at things like 4GL.
Very interesting approach you're taking here, it will be interesting to see where it goes, and wish you great success!
That probably covers 95% of my day job, consulting, and my startup - I deliver a ton of work. Rails my 90% go to for web, python is data science, C is performance. A notable mention is coffeescript/js and CSS for design, but with partials / templates in the web frameworks I don't really need things like React.
I think the problem you describe is a self created one. You don't need to use the latest tech, build micro services, upgrade them independently, and use frameworks that are well supported in what you know. Hasn't failed me yet.
With respect, I think you are speaking from the position of someone who has known how to use this technology for so long, he has forgotten what it was like not to know it.
Take your "90% go to for web" stack. You'll need to know:
* Web server of choice
* Database setup
* Linux sysadmin
* AWS
There was a front-end dev guide linked on the front page yesterday (https://github.com/kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap). Just...look at it. Count the pages. Even if you stipulate that you already know Rails, the rest of what you need to know is still a huge wall to climb.
And sure, by now, you have all that knowledge in your head, same as I do. (Probably better; I always hated web programming.) But asking somebody new to scale that wall just to join in with the supposedly open web? Seems a little much.
And I'm still pretty confident that I (with Anvil) would deploy a simple application faster than you (with Rails). Not because you're a bad developer, but because even with all your knowledge you're still navigating that stack - and deploying it, and debugging it, and editing it without autocomplete because no IDE can sensibly autocomplete a system with that many independent layers, and so on.
I agree with your premise, but not your conclusion. Its not that navigating the stack that introduces the slowdown, its that making your own choices as to what that stack will be leads to a very specific stack that not many are using. Because of that the tooling for that specific stack is most likely non-existant meaning that you have to context switch a lot to perform common tasks (now, if you're good at context switching, it might not be a problem). Its the same problem of working in a high level vs low level programming language. If you're trying to do something that the high level language was designed for, you'll have a good time, but if not, you might just be shit out of luck.
I completely agree with you. Use the tech you know, and learn new tech with time. Staying on the bleeding edge is fun but doesn't have the payoffs people think it does.
My stack is pretty much 100% JavaScript. I can do PHP, I can do Go, but I can build full-stack apps very quickly in JS.
If (1) is an indication - its about a hospital management system built using visual tools, with a first version done in 6 months - the current attempt at 4GL scales better.
Hi. This is Dan, CTO of Meter Feeder (YC W16). Nice experiment. For comparison, Jim (my co-founder) and I built the MVP of Meter Feeder in a weekend back in Oct '14.
We spent a lot of time working on the business requirements that we got from our first potential customer.
Finally! I've been wanting something approaching this for modern development since NeXT dropped EOF (enterprise objects framework) in the '90's.
See this Steve Jobs demo [1] from the 90's creating a DB driven app in a fewminutes. It's 2018 and we're just getting back to that level of productivity now.
Are you targeting Anvil as a competitor to Django/Ruby on Rails? I'd love to find something better than Django, but closed-source + small community + the pricing model all suggest that I'm not quite the demographic.
I feel like most people who need a website to "take orders for your new widget, or keep track of your customers, or schedule your local football league" are best off just contracting it out. I'm not sure how this moves the value needle to make an average person want to learn web development.
What struck me is how similar your Meter Feeder prototype is to parking application deployed in Prague, which then has added feature that the enforcement happens through streetview-style cars which read registration plates by machine vision. Somewhat non-typically for what is effectively government project the thing seems to mostly run on AppEngine.
By building "imaginary prototypes" of these YC companies in an hour or two, we're not trying to minimise how hard it is to start a business like this. But the hard part of starting (eg) Meter Feeder should be selling the service to local governments, not wrangling the ~5 programming languages and 3-4 frameworks you need for the modern Web. We eventually got fed up of ranting online about it, and decided to do something about the problem. Anvil was the result :)
(Edited to add: We're hiring! If you're in the UK and this floats your boat, check out https://anvil.works/jobs)