Convex vs. Firebase • Hacker News Board

Re: Convex vs. Firebase

#81

Post by _vvhw » Thu, Jun 23, 2022, 6:59 AM UTC

jmkni wrote: post #43

_vvhw wrote: post #30

The founders of Convex are some of the most talented developers I know. The CTO worked with Turing-award winner Barbara Liskov on Viewstamped Replication Revisited [1], the revision of the pioneering consensus protocol, and later the founding team pulled off the migration of Dropbox from S3 to their own custom storage stack called Magic Pocket [2]. The deterministic simulation testing techniques [3] they used to deve…

Fun fact, Barbara Liskov is the L in SOLID

And coined the term “killer heuristic” for chess algorithms.

Re: Convex vs. Firebase

#82

Post by swyx » Thu, Jun 23, 2022, 3:59 PM UTC

jamwt wrote: post #63

swyx wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i'm also equally impressed by their background, and puzzled that they choose to target frontend developers rather than backend developers (who presumably they would be much better able to solve problems for?)

(Founder / CEO of Convex here) Hi Shawn. I don't remember you bringing this up when we spoke in person recently, but it's a great question. In our opinion, the very best way to evaluate yourself as a backend developer is how directly you solve problems for frontend developers. We believe in the merit of customer obsession, and the customers are not buying queues. They're buying the product as they see it: its surface…

hey jamwt! no i wasn't thinking about this at the time, someone mentioned it when discussing Convex and I thought "huh, thats an interesting way to look at market-founder fit" so I just tossed it out there.

great answer :) if you can solve DX for frontend you're solving it for everyone.

Re: Convex vs. Firebase

#83

Post by swyx » Thu, Jun 23, 2022, 4:00 PM UTC

ikhare wrote: post #75

swyx wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i'm also equally impressed by their background, and puzzled that they choose to target frontend developers rather than backend developers (who presumably they would be much better able to solve problems for?)

(I work at Convex) I was the one of the original TLs of Google Photos, specifically on Android and eventually managed all of the frontend teams for Google Photos. So I hope it's not a stretch to say that I have deep empathy for frontend problems. We also have great frontend oriented folks on the team. I also worked with jamwt at a previous company (Bump) doing frontend work. When we worked together, I remember the ac…

i... feel like i shouldve figured that out, because i definitely saw that in your profile but just didnt make the connection. thank you!!

Re: Convex vs. Firebase

#84

Post by ikhare » Thu, Jun 23, 2022, 9:03 PM UTC

swyx wrote: post #83

ikhare wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I work at Convex) I was the one of the original TLs of Google Photos, specifically on Android and eventually managed all of the frontend teams for Google Photos. So I hope it's not a stretch to say that I have deep empathy for frontend problems. We also have great frontend oriented folks on the team. I also worked with jamwt at a previous company (Bump) doing frontend work. When we worked together, I remember the ac…

i... feel like i shouldve figured that out, because i definitely saw that in your profile but just didnt make the connection. thank you!!

Hey no problem! We’re all trying to make this space better. Thanks for all the work you put into it too!

Re: Convex vs. Firebase

#85

Post by okhobb » Fri, Jun 24, 2022, 3:06 AM UTC

TekMol wrote: post #6

According to the article, this is how you load messages and their users from a DB via Firebase: const querySnapshot = await getDocs(collection(db, "messages")); const userSnapshots = await Promise.all( querySnapshot.docs().map(async messageSnapshot => { return await getDoc(docSnapshot.data().creator); }) ); Phew! Thanks, but no. Never. I will keep doing it server side: $messages = DB::select( 'SELECT * FROM messages…

This is a strawman and no one would actually design a messaging app using a NoSQL db like that. Typically one would employ a strategy to fan-out data such that the message document has everything needed to render a message in the UI.