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nathanstitt
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Hi, I'm Nathan Stitt. a software developer and creator of many things. Engineering manager at OpenStax.org, a large educational non-profit
I own a consulting company Argosity.com and write primarily Ruby, go, client-side JS, and iOS stuff.
Contributor to OpenStax, DocumentCloud and various other open source projects: https://github.com/nathanstitt.
My email is <first name>@<last name>.org
- nathanstitt parentteable looks very interesting, I hope you do follow through on open sourcing it.
- heh, I'll throw my formial (https://github.com/nathanstitt/formial) project onto this thread. I probably need to update it a bit but it's been working well in production for 2+ years now.
Where were all these alternatives when I was looking for a WYSIWYG form builder?
- Ah, yep that makes complete sense if you want to per-tenant schemas. My app is multi-tenant but all have the same schema. We use a customer_id column that's matched against the JWT's customer_id token to ensure that no data is shared inadvertently by a dev missing adding a WHERE clause.
Thanks for the SF link, that's quite interesting. It seems bonkers to me to throw away all the advantages of the RDMS but you can't argue with their success.
A middle ground I've encountered in an ERP system (prophet21 if you're interested) was each table had multiple "CUSTOM_XX" columns that were initially blank. Customers could edit their UI and would drag/drop the custom columns onto the appropriate form and change the label to be whatever they'd like. That gave them some flexibility but kept the core schema coherent.
- Congrats on launching!
It looks like you started with Hasura GQL and switched to your own implementation (https://github.com/twentyhq/twenty/pull/156).
Would it be possible to comment on what influenced your decision here? I've built ontop of Hasura in the past and it's permissions model seems like it'd be a good fit for a CRM
- OpenStax | Software Engineer II | Remote | Full-time | https://emdz.fa.us2.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/CandidateExperienc...
The OpenStax Kinetic team is searching for a full stack software engineer. Our frontend is React/Typescript and backend is Rails. It's a small team where you'll be able to have a large role in setting the future technical direction of the product.
Kinetic is a new open-source project that helps to connect researchers with study participants. You can read more (and participate!) at https://openstax.org/kinetic/. It's source code is fully available at https://github.com/openstax/kinetic
Have questions? I'm the engineering manager for the team and am happy to answer anything, my email is in HN profile.
- OpenStax | Software Engineer II | Product Manager| OpenSource | Fully Remote
The OpenStax Kinetic team is searching for a Product Manager and full stack (React/Rails) software engineer.
- Product Manager: https://emdz.fa.us2.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/CandidateExperienc...
- Software Engineer: https://emdz.fa.us2.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/CandidateExperienc...
Kinetic is a new open-source project that helps to connect researchers with study participants. You can read more (and participate!) at https://openstax.org/kinetic/. It's source code is fully available at https://github.com/openstax/kinetic
Have any other questions? I'm the engineering manager for the team and am happy to answer any questions, my email is in HN profile.
- I subscribed to the newsletter and browsed the listings https://feinternational.com/buy-a-website/
I contacted them about any that looked promising and they send you a prospectus that listed the name and the financials. After signing a NDA of course.
- Yeah I’m not a fan of the php, but I have written it in the past so don’t mind it that much. I’ve went through and updated it a bit but am forcing myself not to get sucked into updates that realistically wouldn’t add much value
As I’ll document next post, I’m writing new features in React with graphql. I’ve managed to integrate that fairly well without needing huge changes to the existing codebase
- It is my first time purchasing any type of business. In the past I've mainly invested in commercial real estate.
My thought is that it has a much quicker pay-off than pretty much any other investment. If I only manage to hold the site together for say 3 years it should have a positive ROI. Plus if I can actually grow the customer base it'll be an even bigger win.
No plans to flip it. I'd like to see it grow to rival some of the other bigger project management solutions out there.
- Not sure about the other cloud providers, but AWS has billing limits with email warnings when you approach them. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2...
- In the past they had outsourced pretty much everything about the site, but we've taken it all in house.
It's mainly just myself and my wife who handles marketing and UI. We joke that I build it and then she makes it pretty.
We do have an assistant who we'll probably hand 1st level support off to at some point but right now we're handling it all so we can keep a close eye on what's going on.
I'm still piecing together how customers were found in the past. I know the original owner did content marketing and at least some affiliate deals, since some user accounts have a referrer noted.
I'm planning to do at least some high touch sales in the markets that we seem strong in. So far we've identified attorney support firms and realtors are using it successfully.
- Definitely not millions, more like mid 10s :-D
A good rule of thumb for valuing a SaaS is to take trailing 12 months revenue and multiply by 2-5 depending on the growth potential of the the business.
In this case it was at the bottom end of that scale due to signups having slowed to a trickle.
I valued it a bit more since it has a huge list of past customers. My hope is that once the updates are completed I can convince at least some of the to resume subscribing by a tasty "6 month free" type offer.
- good point, rss is at the index page, but I wasn't linking to that yet since I only have the single post. https://nathan.stitt.org/myclientspot/index.xml
I'm trying to stay one month ahead of the posts. For instance I've already finished modernizing the UX and re-launched on my own servers. Now I'll write that up and post it at the end of month
- Hi HN! Like the title says I recently purchased a SaaS (https://myclientspot.com/) that was desperately in need of updates and am gradually working through it. I'm planning to write a series of posts about the process. This is the first and covers the acquisition and lessons learned through that process.
- One of the reasons is that the books are often used in printed format in classrooms and it's important that the page numbers of the ebook match what the teacher assigns from the printed copy.
With epub format the page # will vary depending on font size.
There's probably other reasons as well, but that's one that I've heard mentioned.
- I used object proxy to create a DSL for constructing object factories, inspired by Ruby's FactoryBot https://github.com/nathanstitt/object-factory-bot
It's pretty handy for generating data for unit tests, but wouldn't recommend it for production code since I've discovered Proxy is fairly slow.
- Not quite. The large round speedometer in the center on the mini is only to honor the old mini look. They also have a fairly large digital speedometer on the top of the steering column.
- Exactly! Thanks for pointing this out because everyone seems to miss it.
At the moment that an investment is made, a company should be worth just as much as it was before, but will have more liquid assets because it's traded equity for cash.
The question for employees and shareholders then becomes: "Do you believe management is capable of using the cash to build additional value, or will they waste it?"
- Library looks attractive, but it has 185 open issues and 106 pull requests.
The pull requests go back to 2013, I have no idea why people continue to open new ones since it appears they have little chance of getting them merged.
- I've used gh-board before and really like the ability to "merge repos" You can view all the PR's across multiple organizations and repositories, which makes it very handy for someone who's a member of multiple projects. Plus it's open-source!
- I agree, that's the single feature that's always kept me loyal to Firebug. There's a bug open on that at: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=972655
I'm attempting to find time to assist with it, but haven't thus far. Perhaps throwing it out here will bring in additional assistance
- I suspect that a larger issue might be that Linux users tend to run servers with multi-terabyte collections of stuff.
It'd be difficult for them to make money at $5 a month off a guy who wants to backup 20TB of usenet archives or whatever.
Right now those kind of collections are weeded out since they don't backup network shares.
- Same. Mine didn't burn much oil, but would refuse to start when the engine was warm because of the weak compression. Would fire right up when it was cool though.
Loved how it handled and the 9,000 rpm redline.
- I really like Telerick. They do seem to have a good system of widgets and data bindings. I haven't used them in anger though so don't really know for sure.
I was pretty bummed they removed the grid from the open-source components though. That's the main thing that's stopped me from going further in evaluating them
- I may be misremembering, but my recollection was my then employer started using Ext version 2 primarily since it had the rich widget ecosystem and also supported IE 4 well. We were writing internal enterprise apps and it was a good fit.
As you can guess, that's been quite awhile ago. My memory is fuzzy on the details to be sure.
- Exactly! Well said, "any jackass can plop in a data table and move on." The problem with that approach is that it's very deceptively easy. The data table morphs into a screen, then into an app, and before long you've got a big fat steaming pile of JS that is a 5mb download.
And then you get some really weird bugs like "If these two components are layed out inside an hbox, every once in a while you get a "Layout Run Failed" exception". Not that that's happened to me or anything :)
I'm actually in the middle of an exploratory re-write to use straight Backbone. I'm hopping to wrap up widgets like DataTable, Select2 and such into Backbone views and use them.
It's early days on it, but am hopeful that I'll arrive at something useful.
- Yeah, I agree that ExtJS is a pretty good fit for Stockor, and is why I choose it originally.
Now I'm struggling with being more responsive and wanting to open the code up for embedding widgets into third party pages. Extjs really doesn't work well for either of those cases.
As for testing: They've got some fairly decent tools for it. I'm just using Jasmine though.
- Article's a bit over a year old, but the points it raises are still very valid.
As the creator & maintainer of a large ExtJS application (stockor.com/demo), I find it very much a mixed bag.
Love the comprehensive widgets that are all integrated with the data sources. Back in the early days of SPA architecture I'd say they were far above everyone else.
Hate the slow, JS driven layouts. Something that's not immediately obvious when using ExtJS is that all layout is conducted by it's own engine and applied via inline style tags which set the width/height of each element. This might have made sense back in the IE3/4 days (when I started using it), but I find it really sucks now since you're hobbling the browser and not allowing it to do what it does best - Laying out webpages.
And there's the perennial bugs. Sencha is attempting to re-create the entire web ecosystem themselves, so it's no surprise that they don't quite pull it off seamlessly. I won't elaborate on this too much since it's pretty easy to visit their own forums to get a sense of the frustration level with this.
I'd posit that ExtJS made quite a bit of sense back when IE4 support was still a big thing, but I'm pretty sure it's best days are behind it. I'm sure it'll hang on for quite awhile in corporate environments, but I don't see any reason to use it for new development.
- A warrant's has to also have legal justification, i.e. "reasonable suspicion". If it does not, that's one more thing that can be argued at trial, with the possibility that the search can be thrown out.
Of course, the only time that kind of stuff gets vigorously challenged is if the defendant has top-notch legal representation. Public defender's typically would rather just plea-bargain it out.
Still, it's great progress for keeping everything above board as much as possible.