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

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

#31

Post by rgbrgb »

I like the clean design and general straightforwardness of the site. Exciting that you're taking on such an established paradigm.

My questions are about initial audience...

I showed this to a software designer just now (who codes a little bit, maintains a site deployed to vercel) and the response was "this is a coding tool, I don't get it". For me as an experienced developer, I know git really well so it doesn't solve a problem for me.

That said, I totally remember git being frustrating to learn in college!

Who do you go after first, how do you find them, and what's their core use case?

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

#32

Post by iddan »

videlov wrote: post #9
slackstation wrote: post #8

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 t…

Hey, thanks for sharing your thoughts! Co-founder of Sturdy here. We are focused on teams who work closely together and iterate quickly. People often want ship small incremental changes to production. In those cases we found there is a significant overhead of creating/reviewing/merging Pull Requests. At its core Sturdy is about allowing early and continuous feedback in asynchronous collaboration. The equivalent of sw…

Sounds like it would be much nicer if you had a plug-in to the IDEs to make the interaction feel native

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

#34

Post by gmueckl »

You're close to having a real killer feature if you manage to make Sturdy scale to working copy sizes in the range of 100GB and 10TB in conjunction with the automatic sync of local directories. Game studios would love you for that. They have a few pain points: game assets and their source files are huge, networks become bottlenecks and most artists barely understand a basic VCS workflow, let alone a distributed one. Making commits and data syncing transparent would be a huge deal.

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

#35

Post by videlov »

rgbrgb wrote: post #31

I like the clean design and general straightforwardness of the site. Exciting that you're taking on such an established paradigm. My questions are about initial audience... I showed this to a software designer just now (who codes a little bit, maintains a site deployed to vercel) and the response was "this is a coding tool, I don't get it". For me as an experienced developer, I know git really well so it doesn't solv…

Thanks! (Co-founder here)

Our focus is on software teams who closely collaborate to ship product functionality (eg. do daily 'standups'). We want to make the process of helping one another much better that what the status quo is today. For example, I have found that a code review process rarely creates deeper discussions on design/ideas, something that comes more naturally when pairing. With this said, we also want to make contributing code to be more accessible to people new to the profession.

Small teams that care about iterating quickly and frequently shipping to production are the type of folks we work closely with in developing the product.

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

#36

Post by videlov »

dirkg wrote: post #29

this may work well for teams of 2-5, I simply don't see this working at all for any larger teams or any team with formal development processes. The whole idea of merges/PRs etc is to be able to formalize this stuff, track it, keep history etc in a way that is open and can be used with multiple tools. Using some kind of proprietary, or even open source, web backend SaaS completely defeats this. And the whole 'real tim…

Thanks for sharing your perspective. I understand the point of formalizing contributions but wish to challenge the need to do so for every type of contribution. For instance changes that have low impact production (eg. clarifying documentation) are subject to the same process as high impact changes. We are experimenting with an idea where depending on configuration + heuristics (file, author, semantics of change) the formal review is skipped, recommended or enforced. Alternatively, permit deployment to staging environments without sign off.

What we aim to achieve with the real-time design is create value that would not otherwise be possible. For example, making use of CI much more frequently. I have in the past made and pushed throwaway commits just to trigger CI and get feedback sooner.

We have been using Sturdy in it's own development over the past 9 months. I'd say the workflow doesn't quite resemble pair programming. We check each other's work-in-progress occasionally and give code suggestions/comments whenever we can be helpful to one another.

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

#37

Post by rolisz »

nonameiguess wrote: post #26

Anyway to self-host this? I don't see much use for other people on my team seeing my line-by-line edits in real time in their own editor as opposed to just watching on screen share, but I like to work on multiple hosts on my own LAN and it's annoying to have to push to a git server to synchronize, and easy to forget. I tried to just mount all of my repos via NFS, but the performance was atrocious and git didn't seem…

For synchronizing things across multiple hosts I strongly recommend SyncThing. It just works :TM:

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

#38

Post by jonwest »

rolisz wrote: post #37
nonameiguess wrote: post #26

Anyway to self-host this? I don't see much use for other people on my team seeing my line-by-line edits in real time in their own editor as opposed to just watching on screen share, but I like to work on multiple hosts on my own LAN and it's annoying to have to push to a git server to synchronize, and easy to forget. I tried to just mount all of my repos via NFS, but the performance was atrocious and git didn't seem…

For synchronizing things across multiple hosts I strongly recommend SyncThing. It just works :TM:

If multiple hosts have the file open you run into sync conflicts pretty often, and that would be exacerbated by something within VCS. Don’t get me wrong it’s not a bad piece of software but not in the same spirit of the software in this post.

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

#39

Post by cutemonster »

videlov wrote: post #9
slackstation wrote: post #8

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 t…

Hey, thanks for sharing your thoughts! Co-founder of Sturdy here. We are focused on teams who work closely together and iterate quickly. People often want ship small incremental changes to production. In those cases we found there is a significant overhead of creating/reviewing/merging Pull Requests. At its core Sturdy is about allowing early and continuous feedback in asynchronous collaboration. The equivalent of sw…

> would instantly swap the content of your project dir

How does this work, if the differences between two branches are huge? Say, tens of megabytes. And the Internet connection not that great. If switching back and forth between branches, is there a local cache or does everything (all differences) get downloaded each time?

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

#40

Post by cutemonster »

videlov wrote: post #36
dirkg wrote: post #29

this may work well for teams of 2-5, I simply don't see this working at all for any larger teams or any team with formal development processes. The whole idea of merges/PRs etc is to be able to formalize this stuff, track it, keep history etc in a way that is open and can be used with multiple tools. Using some kind of proprietary, or even open source, web backend SaaS completely defeats this. And the whole 'real tim…

Thanks for sharing your perspective. I understand the point of formalizing contributions but wish to challenge the need to do so for every type of contribution. For instance changes that have low impact production (eg. clarifying documentation) are subject to the same process as high impact changes. We are experimenting with an idea where depending on configuration + heuristics (file, author, semantics of change) the…

> We have been using Sturdy in it's own development

I'm wondering, if one person has some edits in progress (which won't compile), and another person wants to compile and run the app, then, does s/he need to wait for the first one to be done editing?

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