Creating a Startup Support Crew

keith.t.elliott · February 18, 2021, 4:21pm

@danny and @viperfx good thoughts. Blazing new trails is slow and toilsome. But, once the path exists, customers can zoom along it with ease.

So, getting one super-jazzed business customer in place seems to be a key Go-Do.

Because, folks (potential customers, that is) that lack vision would really benefit by seeing others use it.

Along these lines, when I visit/review the tape.sh home page, I leave it unsure of what exactly tape is doing for me. I desire to see it in action (the pitch is interesting, but I really want to see actual examples). Given the change-behavior challenge, maybe showing a use-case example at the top would help. For example… ‘Keith is a software consultant that shows his clients their latest features via Tape. Check one of his recent tapes -link here-. Live screen sharing often works for this activity, but Keith has found that complementing live sessions with Tape has improved iteration times. It took some time to integrate Tape into the workflow, given the fresh way of thinking that it facilitates. Now, however, Tape is a core part of Keith’s workflow & toolset.’

Again, just brainstorming.

Finally…

Ahh! Maybe I missed my calling. I could have been a hypnotist, or maybe a DJ on a cheesy 1970s soft rock station…

Have a great trailblazing day!
Keith

keith.t.elliott · February 27, 2021, 5:12am

Well, it was a big week for Redwood, with the Prerender release.

And how about you, my fine building-a-product-or-service-with-Redwood friends?

Hope you had a great week!

And, I hope you recharge over the weekend. A weekend change of pace can help get the creative juices flowing.

Next week, how about posting a recent win or a goal you are pursuing? (e.g. a sale, feature release, a marketing effort, a blog post, etc). We can cheer you on!

Go Redwooders Go!

Keith

ajcwebdev · February 27, 2021, 9:40am

Food for thought: Software Engineering Radio - Starting Your Own Software Company with Matt Arbesfeld (cofounder of LogRocket).

noire.munich · February 27, 2021, 1:05pm

Hello Support Crew,

We’re moving forward with the startup I mentioned earlier, Monday morning a 9am sharp will input a yarn create redwood-app ./ for an estimated public release of Q3-2021.

It’s a business, digital products in the sport industry.

I’ll keep you posted.

mojombo · February 27, 2021, 4:59pm

Very cool! I look forward to hearing how it goes and how we can improve Redwood to make your startup life even easier!

noire.munich · February 28, 2021, 9:12am

Very much indeed \o/

And yes, definitely, should happen in the coming weeks :).

keith.t.elliott · March 5, 2021, 5:16am

@noire.munich, one more day in startup work-week 1 enjoy the ride!

noire.munich · March 5, 2021, 7:43am

Thanks Keith X) I’ve stacked 40 hours yet, on my way to 50h at the end of the first week >< I was not prepared for this!

This being said RW is very helpful and I appreciate the support crew cool idea @keith.t.elliott .

About RW working on the project leads me to believe there’s some scaffolding we can do on translations.
Also, scaffolding improved a lot, awesome to see where the tests are at now. However I still find myself in a position to rework the structure of the scaffolded code on the web side, it takes some time but is crucial to have a feeling of a healthy codebase. I know it’s a topic for some of us.

Last day will be

keith.t.elliott · March 18, 2021, 2:55am

Hello Fellow Builders,

I fell off the planet a couple weeks for some family spring break time, then the day-job-monster gobbled me up… but now I’m back.

Some quick encouragement…

Spread your good news (call it marketing if you want)! Just don’t forget to spread your good news. It may seem unnatural to us developer-types to talk about your work and ask people to try your products, but it’s just plain normal and necessary. Like coding, it gets easier with practice. Just let your natural passion show - others will appreciate it. A great place to start/practice: show off your app & wins in our Show & Tell forum

I was reminded of this point when listening to the podcast @ajcwebdev recommended a couple weeks ago. The guest, Matt Arbesfeld, used the “if a tree falls in the woods and nobody sees it, did it fall?” question to ponder “if you build an app but don’t tell people about it, does it count?” (the answer is no) Well, I was in the woods cross-country-skiiing when I listened to this, so I’ll forever have that analogy seared into my brain

Iterate! Try different things! Good products and services generally take lots of iteration. Try not to be upset if others call your baby ugly. In fact, to help get over this, I personally ask folks to “call my baby ugly” all the time - just not my beautiful real human babies

Happy building (and marketing),
Keith

noire.munich · March 18, 2021, 8:07am

Hey! Got some feedback, in my third week in the startup process. I narrowed it down to 3 points, but if there are some other questions to consider I’d be happy to answer

v0.27.1 → new upgrade policy

Due to past experiences w/ RW I decided that we should wait at least a week before applying an upgrade, wich we did with v0.27.0.
When I launched the upgrade v0.27.1 was out there. It broke our tests ( issue already documented ) and did not ship what I was expecting from prisma 2.17, the fix on the shadow database bug.
This one pulls a full stop on some of our developments, any that need model update actually, so it’s a problem.
It prompted us to seek another framework upgrade policy, which should be until v1 to apply upgrades to latest version -1, in hope it will helps us stabilize the upgrade process.
Sad since RW ships a lot of cool new stuff each version, but we don’t have much of a choice.

Storybook

I’ve tried using the @storybook/addons essentials, such as Docs, with no success. According to this thread Storybook v6 is not supported yet though plans are here for v1 support. Storybook is very useful for fast developing of our web components but it also is relevant as application documentation - basically in a startup context, if setting up a preprod env takes more time ( our case ), a product owner could use some storybook to see how some things are going and try out some things on their own. As of today Rw’s implementation of Storybook is not as supportive as it could be expected.

Schema modelisation showcase

The folks at the origin of the concept for the startup are rather serious about their data structure, they could be interested in reading a prisma schema but ideally if they could work w/ a graph they’d be happy. There’s a thread on prisma’s github about the issue, this is not coming any time soon. That would be a really nice addition to RW if anything ever happens on that side.

@keith.t.elliott I’d love to have you call my baby ugly! ( seems weird written all out… )
I’ll see if the founders of the project are ok with this, but maybe it could be feasible to have some sort of private demo env for RW’s people :).

noire.munich · March 18, 2021, 5:51pm

Checked w/ founders, in the coming weeks we’ll open a staging environment specifically for the redwood curious minds.

keith.t.elliott · March 19, 2021, 4:36am

@noire.munich thanks for sharing details of your challenges. It’s a work in progress. I am glad you clearly explain specific needs/issues, to help drive toward the enhancements you need.

And yes, I would be happy to participate in a demo and provide a fresh perspective to help you and your team fine-tune. I’ll be nice, and simply do my best to provide constructive feedback to help you thrive. Reach out with a specific time when you are ready.

Cheers,
Keith

Irev-Dev · March 19, 2021, 7:25am

I saw this thread a week ago and knew I had to come back and get involved.

One thing that I think would be useful to me personally is doing a weekly standup. I think airing out current challenges and then also have some form of accountability of what I’m going to try and get done in the coming week with like-minded peers would be great.

There is already the room on the redwood discord, maybe we could decide on a time weekly? Would that be useful to anyone else?

I guess I should introduce myself. I’m working on a terrible idea that’s never going to make any money lol.

I say that because I’m going about starting an app wrong in that I’m making something I would like to exist rather than something I know I can charge for. I’m trying to build tooling around a niche CAD technique, that is designing 3d mechanical parts purely with code. What I do know is there is a deep love of this kind of CAD from devs in particular, but I also know that it’s not really used at all professionally which is why I’m focusing on community.
I figure what I can do is built it up enough that it’s useful to some folks, and then perhaps I’ll be able to step away from hardcore development and the work will continue to foster the community. I’m also trying to build-in-public so that if it goes no-where maybe I’ll have at least built a bit of an audience that could help with the next thing.

What’s built so far is at: https://cadhub.xyz/
And we’ve got a bit of a roadmap at: Roadmap and Planning · Discussion #212 · Irev-Dev/cadhub · GitHub

keith.t.elliott · March 20, 2021, 12:35am

@Irev-Dev I dig it!

So much so that I echoed your idea in the contributors meeting today and, as you might imagine, everyone is jazzed about the idea.

The other general advice, broaden this audience from ‘startups’ to ‘makers’. Startups are in that audience, but the product-oriented vibe often extends beyond the typical startup venue (my part time app-building is a case in point).

So, let me kick off a logistics-oriented chat in the Discord channel to let us iron out details, then we’ll post the answer here. The likely solution: use Discord and gather for a stand-up at a certain time each week, recruiting a host to keep it moving (I can host routinely, but not always).

Cheers,
Keith

thedavid · March 20, 2021, 4:27pm

@noire.munich Really excited for you! And so very much appreciate how you’re also helping make Redwood better via your contributions + feedback. Lots of things below.

v0.27.1 → new upgrade policy

We 100% recognize upgrades can be tough. I’m torn on this one because what helps Core maintainers the most is having people like you help identify issues with current releases. But that puts the burden on you to put up with new gotchas with every release. Catch 22.

Some status updates:

we’ll have a pretty steady pace of releasing every 2 weeks from now until v1
I expect we’ll have a v1 release candidate in the next 6 weeks

Something I can do is prioritize any bugs you find in current versions. We can figure out a way to handle that process via GitHub Issues + communication. It would be similar to how you and Peter just connected on the Jest issue regarding Context. The downside to this is that we often don’t release those fixes until the next version.

if we could figure out a way to turn around patch releases more quickly (e.g. v0.27.1), would that give you more confidence to stay current with Redwood versions?

and did not ship what I was expecting from prisma 2.17, the fix on the shadow database bug.

^^ what? Can you explain further. Prisma said this was handled… ?

Sad since RW ships a lot of cool new stuff each version, but we don’t have much of a choice.

^^ oh, man, you’re going to what’s coming in v0.28 I’m telling you, it’s going to be painful for you to wait.

Storybook

^^ there’s a lot of conversation about Storybook happening these past few weeks. We will upgrade to v6 for v1 release. And custom config is on the radar.

Would it be possible for you to create a new Issue including the items in your paragraph above? Something like “RFC: Storybook v6 with AddOn and Config Support”. Then identify each of your needs + use cases. Loop in me and Peter P.

Schema modelisation showcase

^^ Curious if you’ve shown them the GraphQL Playground? Are there any other tools/libraries out there that currently meet their needs and could be Redwood project add-ons?

Irev-Dev · March 20, 2021, 6:58pm

This point is less “startup support crew” and more “general redwood promotion”.

Built with Tailwind is a website completely seperate to tailwind, but maybe there could be something similar for redwood built into the redwood website?

Social proof is always a good thing.

noire.munich · March 22, 2021, 5:11pm

Thanks a lot @keith.t.elliott will do!

Thanks a lot @thedavid , I’m really happy about it! And happy it’s something we can make happen together.

More below

Version bumps

Definitely!
We talked about it this morning, we’re willing to stay current with RW’s versions and synchronize with Redwood core team on upgrades.

So, we’re on board with this, we will follow the current RW versions. We are open to provide access to core team members to our github, it could help us both on identifying which side should work on a fix, if ever necessary.

Not waiting anymore only sad we won’t have time to have fun with every new stuff each release :D.

Prisma

Here’s what our PO got, he installed the project a couple of weeks ago and we followed standard heroku db creation. Well at least old standard, maybe we’ve missed something in recent updates.

 yarn rw prisma migrate dev
yarn run v1.22.5
$ /home/florent/PycharmProjects/sportoffice/node_modules/.bin/rw prisma migrate dev
Running Prisma CLI:
yarn prisma migrate dev --preview-feature --schema "/home/florent/PycharmProjects/sportoffice/api/db/schema.prisma"
Prisma schema loaded from db/schema.prisma
Datasource "DS": PostgreSQL database "dbq7iv1ncjm1t3", schema "public" at "ec2-108-128-104-50.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com:5432"
Error: P3014
Prisma Migrate could not create the shadow database. Please make sure the database user has permission to create databases.  More info: https://pris.ly/d/migrate-shadow. Original error:
Database error: Error querying the database: db error: ERROR: permission denied to create database
   0: sql_migration_connector::flavour::postgres::sql_schema_from_migration_history
             at migration-engine/connectors/sql-migration-connector/src/flavour/postgres.rs:192
   1: sql_migration_connector::sql_database_migration_inferrer::calculate_drift
             at migration-engine/connectors/sql-migration-connector/src/sql_database_migration_inferrer.rs:40
   2: migration_core::api::DevDiagnostic
             at migration-engine/core/src/api.rs:100
error Command failed with exit code 1.

Not sure about it but I’ve got a vague recollection that @rob mentioned we could opt-in shadow db use in 2.17, is that accurate? During the 19th of Feb. meetup, chat messages.

Storybook

Done here #2064

Schema modelisation

No, but we discussed it. They are not reluctant but it would mean dedicate time so the PO could learn some GraphQL - that’s not feasible right now nor for the coming months.
Prisma has been working on something for a while apparently but there are no news about it. We’re ok not having diagrams for the schema if we can browse one for the API, which GraphQL Playground doesn’t help with much - unless we use it to export the schema to https://apis.guru/graphql-voyager/. That one, actually, could help the PO and the associates navigate through the data structure.
Our IDE supports diagrams generation w/ yFiles product details, that’s basically what we’d need, but I’m not sure it’d be Redwood friendly.
These are the two leads I’d digg into, to find something that would get us closer to that goal while being a Redwood addon. There are other leads but they are either not free or cloud-based only. I’ll keep in touch if we find something else.

thedavid · March 24, 2021, 7:03pm

@noire.munich Great all around! v0.28 should be out in the next 48 hours — it will take some practice on our end, by I’ve already talked to the Core Team about prioritizing Patch releases. One thing you can do to help us is to make sure possible bugs (if any ) from v0.28 are prioritized and visible to the Core Team, including me. Let’s try some things and iterate, but maybe something like “Potential v0.28 Patch Needed” or similar in a GitHub Issue or any other Title —> just make sure things don’t get buried in conversation.

Prisma and Shadow DB errors

There are possibly two things going on here, both of them related to the new Prisma Migrate requirement for a Shadow DB: About the shadow database

For local dev, check out these requirements from the section “Shadow database user permissions” (screenshot):

If you are using a cloud hosted solution for local development, you will need to take an additional step and create a second hosted DB as your Shadow DB:

keith.t.elliott · April 11, 2021, 2:00am

Let me give a shout to to Tharshan (AKA @viperfx) for giving us a preview of UserVitals during our RedwoodJS Meetup on April 8. He guided us through his vision, his product and his tech stack.

Check it out of you missed it. Better yet, you may be a good customer! UserVitalsHQ.com is a tool to facilitate user feedback to improve product design decisions.

Eventually, all of us startup-minded folks should have the wonderful problem of having too much customer engagement and feedback to handle

Cheers,
Keith

viperfx · April 11, 2021, 5:39pm

Appreciate the support! Really enjoyed giving the talk and providing my own learning to the Redwood community. Looking forward to more community members doing the same with their projects.