Show HN: Chunk – Code sandbox for back-end devs
As developers, we often have problems that could be solved just by running a few lines of code. Sometimes, running this code on your local machine is fine. But other time, the code need to run automatically reacting to external events or to run continuously, which means, it needs to run on a server somewhere.
So now, you have to find a cloud provider, to package or build the code and finally to deploy it. All of that for what could be literally be 4 lines of code.
We couldn’t find an easier way to do this, so we built it.
Chunk is an all in one web editor (think of the codesandbox experience) that allows you to write, deploy and run a piece of code in the cloud from a variety of triggers: HTTP, WebHook, manual or scheduled (cron).
No setup, no build, no deploy. Chunk makes you go from idea to code running in the cloud in seconds.
Let me know what you guys think!
Thanks for building this.
(Won't use it personally as being a pro developer I'd always use my existing cloud provider)
And of course, Glitch stops every instances after 5min of inactivity and it takes a solid 30sec to wake them up after.
Glitch is unbeatable in the frontend part. But we want to make the backend dev experience more seamless.
The boilerplate code part sounds interesting, so chunk is also a bit of a framework? That's really nice, could speed up development a lot more. You're totally right about glitch taking a while to get going with. Does that framework restrict users in anyway, can it be ignored?
why couldn't this be solved much more easily with ngrok or one of its competitors?
Navigated to https://chunk.run/c/new 09:11:33.510 [slug]-844c1730038cbd0f.js:1 got user sessions null 09:11:33.517 [slug]-844c1730038cbd0f.js:1 Creating new chunk. 09:11:33.517 [slug]-844c1730038cbd0f.js:1 No user logged in.
I’m the cofounder of Coherence (withcoherence.com) which is in early beta to bring the same experience to a more typical VSCode cloud IDE/infra as code in your own cloud/CI setup that a software team working on full stack containerized apps would use.
Please consider adding ClojureScript via nbb[0] as a language option.
[0] https://github.com/babashka/nbb
First time hearing about nbb, its cool, I will definitely look into it
I use Make.com (former Integromat) for many automations for my small business, and while quite handy, the automations are cumbersome to edit and very limited. Pretty often I have to resort to something dumb like composing a complex JSON by hand or using a third-party web-service token just to unzip a file. Sometimes I rage too much, wanting to rewrite the whole script of visual blocks in four simple lines of Clojure, but the complexity of deploying that four-lines webhook (or scheduled task) online cools me down pretty quickly, and I just give up.
The no-code approach taken by these automation apps (Make, Zapier..) makes them super accessible, but i agree, when any kind of business logic is involved nothing beats a few lines of code.
You could setup a Chunk as only one "step" of a Make/Zapier workflow. Giving you code-control only where you need it.
We could probably make that even easier by building integration for Make and Zapier.
What is your use-case if you don't mind me asking?
Wanted to leave a comment b/c you have a typo on the front page.
"Scrap the web"