Ask HN: Is there server-side software that we are missing in 2018?

I don't think anyone has solved the issues raised in Out of the Tar Pit in the data storage space. We still spend a ton of effort, perhaps more than ever before, wrangling incidental complexity. In 2018, I should be able to define a simple relational schema in 30 seconds and start using it with effectively zero constraints around data access patterns, transaction volume, and data scale, and with no design decisions needing to be made around these bits of incidental complexity. There should be one gigantic knob I can turn to spend more money to increase more resource consumption of the system, and it should be damned cheap.

We are so far from that reality that it seems obvious there is still a ton of work to do. You can see bits and pieces of solutions but if your product asks me to define indexes, tune queries, determine sharding keys, write against computer-centric (vs human-centric) APIs, cannot deal with change easily, requires babysitting, or falls over after hitting some incidental tipping point relative to the resources available to a single machine, you've not hit it.

I have not used Google Spanner but at 30k/ft it seems like the closest thing out there to the idealized case -- but being closed source and centralized it is not really a "solved problem" imho.

>Static Website generators for non-blogs

We use Jekyll for more than one site which is not a blog, works great for us so far. What features do you think are missing that you wish it had?

Given the sheer number of services on AWS, I would like an expert system that would query me for requirements and then suggest a set of possible services to use together to solve my problem.

I would say anything in the video / 3D / imaging service platforms always have a lot of things left to be desired for.

Anything that potentially touches FFMPEG basically

I can name a few examples that I still think need improvements

- Online gif editors

- Video editing / clipping

- Background image editing / online photoshop equivalents

- Better alternatives than lucidpress / adobeIndesign for catalog page / brochure creation

- Machine learning / deepfake online tool, this is all driven client side mostly

- Pretty much anything client side thats not yet server-side is open game I would say

- PDF markup tools could be better for online-based services, especially for architectural design

- CAD-based online programs for retails so customers can DIY build their own warehouse or layout schemas is lacking

- Better online RDBMS. Currently, there's just airtable, its lacking some core features like refential integrity

- Integrating space-repetition learning in most educational based services (lynda.com,pluralsight, etc)

- Managed ecommerce cart / hosting services. Its a well understood problem that should technically be easy for a client to do.

Again, I would say, almost every profitable service touches some form FFMPEG for video / image editing / 3D is definitely still out there. There's such a huge untapped market out there combining all of theses services in one package.

oklog might be for you? https://github.com/oklog/oklog

It’s still new, but the architecture is sound and it worked well for me on a small single-node deployment (about 30 clients sending logs).