jstayton

Thanks! It's kind of crazy to think that we have platforms now where that's possible. Suri really only works because of that.

That was exactly the inspiration, in fact. I've integrated Auth0 a few times and enjoyed the ability to drop down into code to tailor logic precisely to my needs.

I launched a side project that allows you to run your customer's code from your app: https://www.lateral.run

I went back-and-forth at first on whether now's the time to launch a commercial side project like this, but with some uncertainty about the security of my VC-backed day job, I settled on this being precisely the time to have something of my own going.

> They do provide a service.

That's true. I should have worded it differently. They're trying to attract developers to build apps for their platform, rather than launching them as a service (i.e., SaaS).

For most people considering Sandstorm, Google is probably the last place they'd feel comfortable sharing their data.

I want to push back a bit on this statement:

> Or can one random person, working in their spare time, build just the right app and reach millions of people?

I agree that it's very difficult for one person; however, to win doesn't always need to be defined as becoming the most popular, or reaching millions of people. What if it's 1,000 people paying $10/month? That is possible for one person going the service-oriented route.

This isn't a nitpick about Sandstorm per se — I do love what they're doing — and I understand they're making this argument because what they do isn't a service. But I do think it's possible to find diversity/decentralization in small, independent service-oriented companies that don't care about being popular on the scale of Facebook or Google.

Looks good as a self-hosted option.

Yeah, good question.

There are certainly more privacy-conscious services, but FastMail is good enough for what I'm looking for. The big thing being that they don't analyze my email for advertising purposes.

This list is about a year old, but it provides some more privacy-conscious alternatives: https://www.prxbx.com/email/.

A few people have mentioned http://dovecot.org/ combined with either https://roundcube.net/ or http://www.rainloop.net/.

This is an interesting/creative idea. I've heard about people doing something similar with Twitter and Facebook. While they want you to keep everything forever, it's actually pretty easy to use them more ephemerally.

Their web UI is extremely snappy. Definitely on par with Gmail's web UI, if not faster.

I don't have tons of messages in FastMail — so take that into consideration — but their web UI search seems very quick as well.

I haven't used their mobile app, so I can't speak to that.

Gmail => FastMail

Calendar/Contacts => Apple iCloud

Drive => SpiderOakONE

Chrome => Firefox

Search => DuckDuckGo

Maps => Apple Maps

Photos => Store locally (iPhoto & Lightroom)

Docs => Apple iCloud

Apple may seem like the odd one out, but I trust them quite a bit seeing how they've fought for privacy over the last few years. I also use all Apple devices, so the convenience is also unparalleled.

Yeah, I think that's a fair point, and can certainly be a logical step toward increased privacy.

I agree. They don't sell the privacy-conscious angle as a feature like some, but I'd certainly trust them more than Google or Facebook.

> I'm still looking for a Drive/Photos alternative. Any advice?

I haven't found any photo storage services that really sell the privacy-conscious angle. That said, I'd trust https://www.smugmug.com/ more than Google, Facebook, or anyone else.

For a vanilla, non-photo-specific storage service, there's https://spideroak.com/solutions/spideroak-one.

> I use Dropbox instead of Drive and Photos.

For the privacy-conscious, Dropbox is saddled with the same pitfalls as Google and Facebook, unfortunately.

> Google Search is hard to replace because of the quality. Bing is ok but not close in quality.

https://disconnect.me/search used to show Google search results, but it looks like Google has blocked it for the time being.

I personally use https://duckduckgo.com/. The quality of results is definitely below Google, but I believe that'll only improve as more people switch to them.

https://www.privacytools.io/ and https://prism-break.org/en/ are good places to start. They list most (all?) of the major alternatives for the different categories of apps.

On a personal note, it's definitely possible. I've done it without much loss of convenience, which I think is the main drawback.

> The main issue I have is making my data highly available and resilient at low/no cost.

I think you'll find that most alternative, privacy-conscious services will cost something, primarily because they're not able to profit off of your personal data like Google and Facebook are. For me, I'm definitely willing to pay for that value.

TrackMeNot (http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/) uses this technique to protect against web search tracking.

In general, privacy by obfuscation is an idea that privacy researchers have been considering. Other than TrackMeNot, however, I haven't seen many real-world applications.

Current browser support: http://caniuse.com/#feat=referrer-policy

There's a section in the README about speed: https://github.com/eslint/eslint#how-does-eslint-performance...

"ESLint is slower than JSHint, usually 2-3x slower on a single file. This is because ESLint uses Espree to construct an AST before it can evaluate your code whereas JSHint evaluates your code as it's being parsed. The speed is also based on the number of rules you enable; the more rules you enable, the slower the process.

Despite being slower, we believe that ESLint is fast enough to replace JSHint without causing significant pain."

We've been doing Open Allocation at Monk Development (http://www.monkdevelopment.com) for about a year now, but haven't yet written anything about our experiences.

They call it "Open Allocation". "Holacracy" is similar as well.

A few other companies doing it...

* Zappos — http://qz.com/161210/zappos-is-going-holacratic-no-job-title...

* Treehouse — http://ryancarson.com/post/61562761297/no-managers-why-we-re...

* WL Gore & Associates (parts of the company) — http://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/nov/02/gore-tex-tex...