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A Sad Announcement

omniref.com

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Re: A Sad Announcement

#3

Post by nemild »

I'm sorry to hear the news - code annotation is something we need more of, especially for teaching and debating different design choices. I remember your posts on how MRI/Ruby worked from a few years back, which were always fun - and something that I thought other open source projects would have benefited from.

Re: A Sad Announcement

#4

Post by ChuckMcM »

This is sad, and a bit perplexing.

According to Crunchbase they had exactly 1 seed round (https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/omniref#/entity) and their project provides a really nice feature for github which is better than githubs existing feature. So I'm perplexed why someone like Github doesn't acquihire them, give them a nice bonus for their work over the last couple of years and add their biological distinctiveness to Github[1]. Or Atlassian integrating it with Jira so that your kanban notes can be attached to code as you're developing a sprint.

[1] Yes that is an old Borg reference.

Re: A Sad Announcement

#5

Post by Arubis »

I'm sorry to see this. Before the pivot towards annotation, I used Omniref heavily for its excellent Ruby documentation access; while I hadn't used the newer featureset, I have very fond memories.

Re: A Sad Announcement

#7

Post by gravypod »

This is why I think no one should trust companies that sell you software, that you can't host yourself, for something as critical as documentation and source control. I feel really bad for all the companies that have to jump through hoops to get their data rescued from this company.

It also sucks to loose such a smart company. I wish they had built their solutions as a self hosted system so that people could still use their obviosuly outstanding work.

Re: A Sad Announcement

#8

Post by jzelinskie »

gravypod wrote: post #7

This is why I think no one should trust companies that sell you software, that you can't host yourself, for something as critical as documentation and source control. I feel really bad for all the companies that have to jump through hoops to get their data rescued from this company. It also sucks to loose such a smart company. I wish they had built their solutions as a self hosted system so that people could still us…

The reason why you see startups avoiding this model is because supporting self hosted solutions is extremely difficult as a small team and only impedes the ability to evolve your product. It's a shame, but companies shouldn't adopt products if they lack a feature requirement (data migration).

Re: A Sad Announcement

#9

Post by ianai »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #4

This is sad, and a bit perplexing. According to Crunchbase they had exactly 1 seed round ( https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/omniref#/entity ) and their project provides a really nice feature for github which is better than githubs existing feature. So I'm perplexed why someone like Github doesn't acquihire them, give them a nice bonus for their work over the last couple of years and add their biological distin…

Pretty sure "biological distinctiveness" just got written into an MBA textbook. Integration will never be the same.

Re: A Sad Announcement

#10

Post by gravypod »

jzelinskie wrote: post #8
gravypod wrote: post #7

This is why I think no one should trust companies that sell you software, that you can't host yourself, for something as critical as documentation and source control. I feel really bad for all the companies that have to jump through hoops to get their data rescued from this company. It also sucks to loose such a smart company. I wish they had built their solutions as a self hosted system so that people could still us…

The reason why you see startups avoiding this model is because supporting self hosted solutions is extremely difficult as a small team and only impedes the ability to evolve your product. It's a shame, but companies shouldn't adopt products if they lack a feature requirement (data migration).

This is only the case for complicated deployment proceedures. One of my favorite pieces of software that I love updating is a project called GitBucket. It's a GitHub/BitBucket-esq site. It's simple to host and easy to use without much overhead. The deployment procedures go as follow:

   1. Install JVM 8
   2. Install GIT
   3. Run
If you aren't running a database it defaults to the internal one. All the defaults are sane. It also supports transfering the internal DB to other systems.

The self-hosted model works but it only works for extremely... not simple... but "refined?" setup and deployment procedures. Well bugtested and thoughtout releases. (This includes backups, auto migration, user prompts at startup of dangerious proceedures).

I think that due to this forced side effect of host-your-own that it makes the option preferable. It's harder to do but it proves higher quality control standards and allows for a much much more fail-tolerant archatecture.

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