The core problem with PWAs is that ultimately the success of the overall idea is held hostage by the level of consensus across the browser development teams. Whilst they "collaborate" on "common" web standards (they being many, btw), iOS and Android (note: only 2) have very well defined apis for how to create awesome native UX. The problem of creating a unifying native abstraction (like react native or flutter) that is actually effective from the User's POV, is far more attainable, than that of trying to create a consistently awesome PWA with such inconsistent browser support, across a far greater multitude of platforms than the iOS / Android bifurcation in native-land. My $.02.
PWAs have always seemed like one of those beautifully idealistic yet totally doomed to fail ideas (at least for several years relative to native-based-approaches). Don't get me wrong, I think the web will ultimately evolve into the new JVM (read: via WASM), and the beatific promise that was foretold by PWA will finally reach the masses.
Reality Check: We're not quite there yet. Firefox deleting a legacy, buggy, and dev-time-sink attempt at this, makes total sense to me so they can focus on the other awesome stuff they're doing that actually creates real value for the masses today.
To be fair - perhaps they could've handled the ticket on this a bit more gracefully...? But then again - they know their stuff, so I don't blame them entirely :)
We're building the e-commerce automation platform of the future, today. eCommHub is essentially a domain-specific, intelligent message broker that facilitates easy integration between shopping carts and fulfillment centers. Simple in theory, but complex and full of exciting challenges in practice. At eCommHub, you will have the unique opportunity to tackle a variety of meaningful technical challenges as we scale our SaaS product to automate thousands more online stores.
A handful of technologies and tools we're using today:
Technologies we're actively exploring for upcoming projects:
- Go
- Clojure
- RabbitMQ/ZeroMQ and others
- Docker
- Elasticsearch
- Logstash
- Fluentd
Exciting projects you will have the opportunity to work on:
- Transition to (micro)services oriented architecture
- "40-deploys a day" level continuous delivery (and all the associated automation)
- designing and implementing a well-documented, publicly facing API
- Many more
We integrate with a number of storefronts and marketplaces, including Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, 3DCart, Amazon, and ChannelAdvisor. We integrate using technologies including CSV, EDI, SOAP, and REST.
eCommHub is backed by investors including Sigma Prime, Mosely Ventures, and UPS. We offer competitive salary and equity packages, health and dental insurance, paid vacation, and many other benefits, including offices in Midtown Atlanta near Georgia Tech.
For more information about eCommHub or to submit your application, email jobs@ecommhub.com or contact me directly at jeff@ecommhub.com
It would be interesting to see more details in a blog post about your transition, such as whether you started working on this before quitting your job, how long since you quit your job, what the makeup of your team is, how you met your team, etc. This looks really cool by the way, good job on launching!
Congrats on launching. Its refreshing and inspiring to see people who go from start to launch so quickly, rather than the examples of people in stealth mode for 12-18 months before taking on customers.
There are a couple of services that do similar things, but it seems like a couple possible differentiators would be keeping it dead simple, and perhaps eventually focusing on mobile users.
One of the stated potential uses for the $100k is "help a team make a critical hire". I think this may be a result in part of rising market rates for quality developers.. It used to be a lot easier to get someone to come work on your startup for 1% equity + $30k salary than it is now.
It seems that if you look at full or part time consulting as simply a way to pay the bills while you work on getting a startup off the ground (or working for free as a super early employee at a startup), to the point that its ramen profitable, then consulting can be quite beneficial. In fact I believe I read somewhere that Chris Wanstrath and PJ Hyett were both doing freelance work when they first were bootstrapping github. Remaining extremely frugal despite a six figure salary also seems key here.
This seems like a "it depends on the individual" sort of thing.
Consulting as bootstrapping can work - but it is very very hard. I did this as well and it's easy for the consulting to eat up more and more of your time. I spent a ton of time in 2010 doing 2 consulting projects to keep money coming in - if I had instead looked to borrow the 50k those consulting projects brought in I would be much farther along then I am now.
Do either of you have any advice on becoming an independent consultant? I'm 1 year out of college and working with a government contractor but I'm not sure how much marketable experience I have in that realm, or how to gain it (besides slugging it out for years).
Call a consultant recruitment agency, they'll be able to guide you. The bad news is you DO need to slug it out for years, to gain experience. Not many companies will pay you 100+ USD an hour, if you are fresh out of college.
I talked with a handful of consultant recruitment companies before landing my current contract through one of them. They all said that to get seriously considered, you need a degree and 5 years of full-time commercial experience, OR no degree but 10 years of full-time commercial experience. And that is today. Just 2-3 years ago the requirements were much tougher, due to many consultants on the market, but not very many assignments. This is on the Scandinavian market at least.
Basically, the more experienced you get, the higher hourly rates you can generally get. You'll also need to be able to sell yourself though, which can naturally be hard. That's where the recruitment agencies or agents come in. You get 10-20% less money by going through an agent, but they take care of the selling. You just show up for the interviews.
I often wonder about this as well. Currently I do all of my side projects as software development, but seldom as a consultant although I have now over five years of industry experience, spanning many areas of project development.
For every 1 Zuckerberg there's at least 1000 other people who dropped out to start a company who crashed and burned. Also, just learning to finish big things that you start is a very handy skill to learn and practice, school is no exception.
Correct. On the flipside, just because you finish college, doesn't mean your startup will magically succeed either. It's more the fact that you can finish something that you can make have value for yourself. Too often we think we need to rush out and leave college for good, as if at 19, the opportunity to do a startup will disappear in 3 years.
PWAs have always seemed like one of those beautifully idealistic yet totally doomed to fail ideas (at least for several years relative to native-based-approaches). Don't get me wrong, I think the web will ultimately evolve into the new JVM (read: via WASM), and the beatific promise that was foretold by PWA will finally reach the masses.
Reality Check: We're not quite there yet. Firefox deleting a legacy, buggy, and dev-time-sink attempt at this, makes total sense to me so they can focus on the other awesome stuff they're doing that actually creates real value for the masses today.
To be fair - perhaps they could've handled the ticket on this a bit more gracefully...? But then again - they know their stuff, so I don't blame them entirely :)