https://tiredd.org

As someone who likes the concept of Reddit but dislikes how the site is run, I keep launching short lived Reddit-like side projects. I mostly use Lemmy, but I can’t justify running a SQL server and a VM for projects nobody cares about!

So as a toy project to test out Micro (disclaimer: it’s my day job), I decided to build a fun little Reddit inspired toy app: Tiredd (github repo)

It is only about a thousand lines, and only a single page. The backend is a single Go file, the frontend is a single Angular component, so should be easy enough to hack on.

What it has

Reddit/HN-like ranking of posts

By a combination of score and time. Algorithm taken from here https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-reddit-ranking-algorithms-work-ef111e33d0d9.

Anonymous posting and commenting

But only registered users can upvote/downvote to give the community ability to moderate.

A very rudimentary way to moderate by admins

Make users mods by saving their user ids as a comma separated envar. Unlike normal users, they can vote on an item multiple times, and each time their vote counts as a random value between 4-17. I told you it’s very rudimentary ; ).

Hot/new page

Adjust to your taste by changing the minimum score on the frontend!

Subs

Each post can be categorized under subs, just like Reddit.

What it does not have

Posts are not linkable

Is it a missing feature or a feature? It might actually prevent brigading :)).

Comments are not tree like

Comments are ranked by score just like posts, but there is no reply, quote, or tree structure like on HN or Reddit.

Probably a tons more

Things like password change are missing, there is a chance I will add them!

How to run

As previously stated, the main goal was to run this for free. There is no SQL server dependency, because it is using the DB and User services of Micro, all of which are free.

The go server is a single HTTP server which an be trivially translated to any FaaS provider (as it is stateless) to host the whole thing for free!

Enjoy!

At the start of this hectic year I have joined Micro, an open source microservices platform. The company was born out of a Go framework. We took the concepts of the framework - interfaces for service discovery, configuration and other pieces which can run on any implementation (from mdns locally to kubernetes) and provide a live platform version of it. It’s kind of like Netlify, but for the backend.

Once we were happy with the local development flow for the micro server and CLI, we decided to start selling the product as a platform. Building a website seemed like an obvious step to do. It’s 2020 right?

So we got to work. Metrics with nice charts. Tracing. Calling services. Listing endpoints. It was all shaping up nicely. But slowly and surely we started missing features we got accustomed to on the frontend in the CLI. Being very heavy command line users, whenever we got something available in the CLI, we reached there first.

And then we realised. Who are we building this frontend exactly and why? We prefer the command line. And none of our many thousands of users were asking for a web UI. At most it was considered a “cool” thing to have.

The past three decades have been all about the world wide web (www) and in that we’ve gone through the multiple iterations of building “web first” experiences which I’d argue really peaked in the Web 2.0 era in the mid 00s with the likes of Facebook and others. At some point we entered the “Mobile first” era and yet for developers, Web still became a horrible platform we were stuck with for any platform or tools, AWS is a great example of how to get it really wrong. If new products and platforms are going Mobile first, maybe we as developers need to go CLI first. So here it is. M3O is a CLI first experience. No context switches, no ugly dashboards, just a simple straight forward command line utility that gets out of your way when you need it to. Our hope at Micro is more learn from this experience and do away with Web UIs entirely. Challenge every assumption you know about Web for backend development and think, do I really need that, or is it better served as a single CLI experience.

So we doubled down. We entirely sidelined the web UI and decided payment will be the only thing on the website, should supplying card details in the terminal feel sketchy.

What we found after this surprised us. By limiting our choices we unleashed a storm of ideas on how to improve the single medium we can express our thoughts in.

We started to make service call feel just like any command invocation.

What was previously

micro call servicename endpoint '{"field":"value","otherfield":{"subfield":"value2"}}'

became

micro servicename endpoint --field=value --otherfield_subfield=value2

On the surface it might not seem much, but when you are living and breathing these commands it provides a great satisfaction to remove even little frictions.

New services and their endpoints feel just like builtin Micro commands, which is why our invites simply became

micro invite user --email=someone@domain.com

Shipping features to end users became as deploying a new service, and users can easily programatically call their endpoints from the terminal.

Bash shines at quick and information dense throwaway scripts, so our end to end test framework is built for tests to be written using Micro CLI commands.

We dream of a future where programming is as close to natural languages as possible. At the moment, the ubiquity of bash provides a great layer for us to quickly interact with microservices. It truly feels like the platform is alive as nouns and verbs are being created by service writers to be composed into sentences.

Why don’t you give it a go? We have a free tier ;).

Co-Authored with Asim Aslam.

Amazon derives over 40% of its total value from Amazon Web Services, per Trefis estimates, despite generating only around 10% of net revenues in 2017. This is largely due to the fact that AWS is a high-margin business (25% reported operating profit margin) while non-AWS business streams operate at thin margins. Forbes

But how sustainable are these high margins?

cloud-computing

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