Show HN: Sturdy – online-first version control focused on collaboration

Hey everyone,

My name is Gustav (zegl) and together with Kiril (videlov) we are the founders of Sturdy (YC W21). We are building an online-first version control focused on collaboration. You can think of it as asynchronous pair programming. It still allows parallel work tracks but because Sturdy is centralized and cloud based, it can offer some cool real-time insights.

We felt that collaborating on code today is broken. It is difficult to get started and even after learning all the tools and commands, contributing effectively in a team takes too much effort. This got us sketching and building.

Sturdy is very opinionated around early and continuous feedback. Here are the core principles we have built our VCS around:

* Higher level and more leveraged than existing systems (eg. Git). The actions devs perform are closer to what a human might want. Like “ship this code to production” or “undo the things I did a few moments ago”. In a way this is similar to how high level languages like Python are more expressive than C, at the cost of giving up some control.

* Focused on close collaboration. We are doing away with sharing batches of code (Pull / Merge Requests) in favour of continuous feedback. Developers can see each other’s work-in-progress code in real-time. Trying/running each other’s code is a one-click action and so is making code suggestions or comments.

* Compatible. Despite being a cloud service, developers can still use their local text editor / IDE. We do this with two-way-synced directories on the workstations. Writing and debugging code is local while management and collaboration are done in the webapp. We have also built a Git compatibility layer allowing exporting & importing.

We just finished writing a post telling the story of the mistakes, learnings and vision of our journey https://getsturdy.com/blog/2021-08-18-unbreaking-code-collab.... It turns out that building a new VCS is not just technically difficult but challenging Git also raises a lot of eyebrows (eg. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25121416 ). What do you think? How can we make team VCS better?

You can try out Sturdy today for free, we would love to hear what you think. Moving forward we plan to offer Sturdy as a SaaS with a free tier for smaller teams, and a paid tier for larger organisations and codebases.

We would love to read any feedback you might have in the comments!

Yes, there are a handful! We have some teams using Sturdy and GitHub side-by side at the moment for the projects, and some that are running standalone Sturdy for some newer projects.

And of course, at Sturdy we've been using Sturdy to build Sturdy since day 1.

Thanks! We're planning to build webhooks in a similar way to the way that GitLab/GitHub are doing it. For the formal events (new change, new review, new workspace created, etc) we'll build something similar to the API of others, to make it easy for tools that are already interfacing with the Hub's to integrate with Sturdy. The real-time aspects of Sturdy will also have webhooks, to make it possible to write your integrations and tooling on events such as new files created, or file edits.

I believe that webhooks and great public APIs are important to have in all dev-tools products. I have created countless scripts and tools to connect many different pieces of my workflow, so I'm excited to see what others will build once we release our public API!

This seems like the product of alot of hard work but, ultimately, who needs this? It's not quite fast enough for pair programming.

There are other faster, free, high quality options for pair programming.

The features of one click deploys and rollbacks tie the deployment system to your proprietary closed-source service.

Retraining a team away from PR and Merge Requests would take time for something that doesn't seem to offer much in the way of new benefits.

Do I have to log into a website to create / switch branches? How do checkout code? Do I download a zip from a website and then click a sync button on my IDE? Am I forced to use VSCode for integration or can I use VIM/EMacs?

Good to see that you're dogfooding you're own software.

As a budding git enthusiast, I have a few questions. How are things like merge conflicts handled? Does sturdy support rebasing or some equivalent? Is there an equivalent to hooks?

I sometimes deplug when I want to get in the flow, how well does sturdy perform offline (no internet connection)?