I am such a big fan of Scrimba and everything you’re doing, Per! As someone who learned to code by watching YouTube videos, I immediately saw the value. More than that, I saw the FreeCodeCamp community rush to sign up, engage, and learn from all your new courses. This was only a sign of what was to come. Watching the Scrimba platform, instructor base, and lesson database evolve this year has been awesome, and I see no reason why you’d slow down now. Acquisition offers from the likes of Pluralsight are coming!
Completely see where you're coming from. I work with CometChat and our attitude is to help developers build text, voice and video chat features.
We are a developer tool like any other. The fact that we're a hosted developer tool lets us remove the (potential) headache of DevOps and the (absolutely definite) headache of security and compliance like GDPR and HIPAA. Little things like message history become seamless because we can help manage your data for you.
I hope you don't think this is subtle advertising, though. We're sharing a really good solution and some handy free UI components we worked hard on. People learning Vue can benefit from this tutorial a lot too.
I'm with CobrastanJorji on this one: the tutorial is fine, good even and may persuade someone to use your tool for a chat system on their site.
I think the title being "Build a Vue Chat App" (not so much in the context of your site as that title makes sense there as there is an assumption you're using CometChat to do it, but in the HN post that highlights it) may've been a bit of a letdown to some though.
> The fact that we're a hosted developer tool lets us remove the (potential) headache of DevOps and the (absolutely definite) headache of security and compliance like GDPR and HIPAA. Little things like message history become seamless because we can help manage your data for you.
> I hope you don't think this is subtle advertising, though.
Haha, I see your point. I work with CometChat on content like this. Our content strategy is to help developers like us build awesome chat features. Our platform is a hosted service, granted, but we worked really hard to create a beautiful user interface and clear tutorial that anyone can follow to learn more about managing state in their Vue app. Any constructive feedback on how to improve?
There's nothing wrong with your article as a tutorial on using CometChat. I think it was only problematic because of the lack of context here. For example, it assumes I know what CometChat is, but it's a blog post on cometchat.com, so that seems more than fair.
If it had been posted to Hacker News with a title like "Getting Started With CometChat and Vue," it would have been more clear. Posted to Hacker News under the title "Build a Vue Chat App" made me think it contained instructions on how one might build a chat app or perhaps a war story about someone who tried to build a chat app on Vue but ran into some interesting technical problems.
The tutorial itself actually looks pretty good. I appreciate the GitHub repo with clear "how to run this" instructions at the top and big, explanatory screenshots underneath.
The best tools are the ones you don’t even notice, and Elixir is an absolute pleasure. You get to focus on the problem with little ceremony. Chat is a really interesting application of Channels, too.
It’s especially interesting to me as my team and I are working on a hosted API called Chatkit that makes it equally easy to add real-time chat to your applications, no matter what technology you’re using: https://pusher.com/chatkit
In addition to basic chat data, we also manage, “Who’s online”, typing indicators, rich media... And more
I highlight those features in particular because I am especially curious what that would look like with Elixir and Pheonix? Managing chat data, especially at scale is quite a hairy problem.
By the way, it simple/clean to subscribe to Elixir Channels on other platforms like Android and iOS, for example? One place we think we can add a lot of value is X-platform client SDKs (JavaScript, Kotlin, Swift, etc.)
You should read Discord’s experience with Elixir if you haven’t already [1]. They didn’t use Phoenix channels though AFAIK.
Also the Phoenix channel implementation uses CRDTs behind the scenes from what I gather. They make problems like user presence much more tractable [2].
