sthielen

Thanks! And yeah, I think the timing really feels right for something like this in a way that wasn't the case even a year or so ago.

In addition to the published apps on the discovery side of the platform, we've made a significant investment in tech that enables creators/makers to develop and remix apps in a new way (including spinning up "remote localhost" containers for development; building a collaborative online editor with a unique editing experience that lifts no-code visual abstractions from the underlying code; integrated deploy/CI for both frontends and backends; and other goodies like support for custom domains with automatic HTTPS). This video shows some of that in action [0].

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5uoqPFInlY&feature=youtu.be...

Hi everyone, co-founder/lead dev here. We've been working on Koji for the past six months or so, inspired by the idea of democratizing the creation of interactive content (apps, "mini programs", whatever you want to call them) in the same way that YouTube democratized the creation of interactive video. -- we're still in beta and there are lots of rough edges, but it's nonetheless exciting to wake up and see it on here :)

Happy to answer any questions!

PS - My cofounder (https://twitter.com/dmitry) and I met five years ago here on HN!

I really appreciate your taking a look and writing all of that up. We're only a month or so into public beta, so a lot of things (mainly on that technical documentation side that you mentioned) are still missing. We've been heavily focused on enabling non-technical people, or very early beginners, to use the platform as creators, so we've been a little hesitant to overwhelm them with technical things that might scare them off or make it seem like this isn't a tool for them. That being said, you're absolutely right that it's a huge piece of this (and arguably the most important piece for a certain audience) and part of a balance we need to find moving forward. If you're curious about the answers to those questions, there's a low-level technical writeup on this page [0] that I'm working on incorporating somewhere into the actual product/landing page.

[0] - https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/companies/koji-web-app-develo...

This is awesome! I've been working on something similar with Koji [0], with the added twist of taking templates for full stack (web) apps and cloning remote dev environments + production deployment pipelines alongside the code. It's been especially valuable for more junior devs/people just getting started to be able to "play" and remix an app instead of trying to start building from scratch. Especially when some of them have never even heard the word "repository" before.

There's a lot of interesting stuff that comes when thinking about these kinds of templates from the level of fully-baked products instead of just lower-level components like frameworks and libraries. Excited to see where Github is headed with all of these recent feature releases.

[0] - https://gokoji.com

You can count me as another data point. I started taking coding seriously at around 11/12 years old, working on one of the big Runescape fansites, and very quickly lost interest in playing the game because I found coding to be more fun.

I wonder where this is happening today, for the next generation of developers. Roblox seems like a big one, are there others?

Agreed. For a less reductive perspective, I've found Emily Feng's reporting for the FT to be informative [0,1,2]. I'd be interested in other reading recommendations, if anyone has them.

[0] https://www.ft.com/content/ac0ffb2e-8b36-11e8-b18d-0181731a0...

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/721192f4-a1fa-11e8-85da-eeb7a9ce3...

[2] https://www.ft.com/content/f0d3223a-7f4d-11e8-bc55-50daf11b7...

If you haven't, the 2008 Hugh Aplin translation is worth checking out. I found it made for a bit easier/more casual reading than the sometimes stuffy P/V, which lets the situational humor and the playfulness of the language come through a lot more naturally.

Thanks for the heads up :) We leaned into a lot of location-based stuff in the early days (around the time of the Pokemon Go craze)--check these out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qd6DjJ0GdBQ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCrWYFTDqfU

I think the sentiment implicit in your question—that the initial hype wave of AR has cooled off—is valid. I believe one of the biggest reasons we’ve yet to see AR truly succeed on mobile is that it’s prohibitively difficult it is to create AR content right now. You need professional developers and real budgets to create a single AR experience. It’s too costly for businesses/brands/individuals to experiment or try new things, which is why there are only something like 2,000 ARKit apps on the Apple App Store [0]. Given that, it’s not surprising that we haven’t seen any big, behavior-changing hits aside from Pokemon Go and messenger frames.

You might be interested in what we've been working on at Metaverse [1]. The platform we're building allows non-programmers to create interactive content that leverages AR (our beta testers have already created over 30K experiences).

We’ve been at it for about a year and a half now and are still in beta, but it's being used by marketers, teachers, record labels, etc. [2] These people don’t know how to code (most of them don’t even know what ARKit is). They’re ordinary people [3] who now have access to a powerful tool that lets them try new things, play with new patterns, and leverage otherwise-inaccessible technologies to solve their own problems.

The long tail of Youtube brought us unboxing videos, Twitch, and Justin Bieber; we want to see what AR (and software, generally) begins to look like when ordinary people have the power to create. I think that's where the really cool stuff is going to be. Check out our Twitter account to see some of the awesome things people are making: https://twitter.com/metaverseapp

--

[0] https://sixcolors.com/post/2018/02/this-is-tim-transcript-of...

[1] https://gometa.io/

[2] https://medium.com/metaverseapp

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-VTbkDX694

I think there is a balance to be found between "pinkifying" and "de-blueing" (to wrangle an inversion out of that word). Many of these early education coding platforms use "play" to introduce fundamentals and concepts to kids. They're not intended as formal platforms for computer science education; they want to let kids do cool things and get excited about programming and possibly ramp up into that more formal programming education.

Letting kids manipulate characters from properties to which they've already been exposed is a good way of creating that initial interest. The issue is that assets like Minecraft Steve, or R2D2, or things like that, while obviously loved by no shortage of girls, are still primarily marketed toward boys. Until we can effectively move that needle at a higher, more societal level, I think it's valuable to incorporate media properties targeted toward girls into these kinds of platforms simply in order to engender that initial interest. A kid (regardless of gender) who loves BB8 should be able to use their learn-to-code-platform-of-choice to make BB8 run in a circle. A kid (again, regardless of gender) who loves American Girl should be able to use that same platform to make Julie say something funny.

My company has been doing some work with the Girl Scouts, teaching girls to build games and apps in Augmented Reality, and while the interface/platform itself is sterile and professional (& obviously if you think theming an IDE pink will help "appeal to women," this is an issue), the girls naturally gravitate to characters and assets from the properties to which they are already exposed and are already fans. This includes everything from Minecraft Steve, to Spongebob, to lolcats (which are, apparently, still a thing) to Elsa, and Barbie.

Another way to frame this, which might invalidate/color some of the linked article's points, is to consider "coding literacy" within the context of how the world is moving, and how coding and programming-related concepts are becoming more commonplace and necessary in non-technical careers, and, indeed, in our everyday lives.

In the world these kids will grow up into, having this skillset will be as obvious as having the ability to write one's own documents (as opposed to creating documents via dictation and secretaries/typists), or create one's own presentations. And when being able to program (& I'm using that word loosely; i.e., not everyone is going to be a Haskell dev, but everyone _should_ be able to build "software") is as commonplace and widespread as those previously-technical skills, all kinds of new and amazing use cases will emerge (consider all the things people do with spreadsheets--not everyone is creating financial models...far from it--and the people using spreadsheets to make shopping lists, or organize a Little League roster, or track social media post engagement, are not "Excel Engineers").

If you want to play with something similar, but at a different level of abstraction (software, interfacing with the Google Cloud Vision API in a way that's accessible to non-technical folks -- e.g., teachers are using this pattern to create "scavenger hunts" in their classrooms [0]), check out how it's being done in Metaverse[1].

[0] - https://twitter.com/search?src=typd&q=metaverse%20app

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWuZVM46qa0

Hypercard was before my time; I heard about it recently when someone compared it to what we're building with Metaverse [0].

When you so dramatically reduce the friction required to create that anyone, especially non-technical folks, can do it, all kinds of amazing things happen. I watched an 11 year old build the "Not Hot Dog" app from Silicon Valley, using Google's Vision API, in ten minutes (from never having seen the Metaverse Studio to having her app deployed on device, cross-platform, and sending it to her friends; this is how creation SHOULD be for 99% of people!).

[0] - http://gometa.io (also check out how easy it is to create apps that integrate with IoT devices: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPrBLPG3Smk -- Hypercard for the modern age!)

+1. An absolutely wonderful read. I've found myself constantly gifting copies. To anyone looking to purchase, the Alma Books[0] translation is the one I would recommend.

[0] - https://www.amazon.com/Master-Margarita-Mikhail-Bulgakov/dp/...

GoMeta | Augmented Reality | San Diego, CA | Full-time, Onsite or Remote

Angel backed ($2M), led by Xooglers, GoMeta is building a platform that allows anyone to create interactive AR experiences. What Youtube did for the publishing, distribution, and discovery of video, we are doing for AR.

Our early beta testers have already built all kinds of stuff - https://medium.com/@metaverseapp

Some other links:

http://www.gometa.io/about/

https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/ex-googler-raises-2-...

http://www.cbs8.com/clip/12772141/mad-dash-for-hidden-cash-d...

We are running quickly, and are looking for exceptional developers. Some of the technologies and languages we currently work with are Swift, React, and Node.

Email [email protected] if interested

I think this is part of the new changes as well. I was dealing with a rejection a few days ago because of the new IPv6-only restriction and someone from App Store Review actually called me and we discussed and resolved the issue over the phone. After only ever communicating with them via contact forms and automated responses, I was in disbelief. Speaking to a real person from App Store Review was so absurd in my mind that it may as well have been God calling to discuss my prayers.

I agree. I studied literature in college (coincidentally, my thesis was on Woolf), and am currently working in a technical role at a startup.

I've found incredible value from studying the humanities, especially literature. Some of the courses I took in college completely changed the way I view and understand the world. Literature has been a constant source of inspiration for me, and without doubt has made me a more whole, critical, and creative person--something that has had a marked effect on my career in startups (Caveat: It helps having grown up coding alongside this, I suppose).

With that said, I found the author's examples to be terribly reductive. Studying liberal arts is not going to make you better at finding memory leaks or optimizing algorithms. Exposure to the humanities will, however, make you a more well-rounded human being and help you to contextualize and understand big-picture problems (vision, positioning, identity...the WHY behind the product) from a different (and, of course, not always better!) perspective than might typically be found at a company filled exclusively with STEM graduates. I agree with the headline and the spirit of the article, but it's too bad the author's defense of it doesn't stack up.

My thoughts as well. The author does a wonderfully subtle job exposing that strange naivete that seems so universal to the human experience. It's no surprise that he's a contributor to "This American Life," which I find often hits on that same sentiment. Thanks for sharing this article, OP.

I'm a big fan of Ms. Orlean's. She wrote a wonderful profile piece called "The American Male at Age Ten"[0] that, for very good reason, tends to find its way into many undergrad lit/journalism survey courses.

[0] http://m.learning.hccs.edu/faculty/scotty.moore/anth2351/ant...

This is a topic very dear to me, and I'd like to share the brief conclusion to Walter Pater's The Renaissance. The full text is available online[0]; it's very much worth the read if you're interested in literary appropriations to the problem of human connection and the nature of experience.

Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world. Analysis goes a step farther still, and assures us that those impressions of the individual mind to which, for each one of us, experience dwindles down, are in perpetual flight; that each of them is limited by time, and that as time is infinitely divisible, each of them is infinitely divisible also; all that is actual in it being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend it, of which it may ever be more truly said that it has ceased to be than that it is.

To such a tremulous wisp constantly re-forming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down. It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off–that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves.

[0] http://www.mccoyspace.com/nyu/10_s/ideas/texts/week02-texts....

Beet | Irvine, CA | Full Time | ONSITE

I’m the cofounder of http://beet.ly. We’re closing our seed round and looking to hire employee #1. We’re looking for a developer who can ship products and iterate fast. You’ll be joining the two of us to shape the direction of the Beet platform. We’re only a few steps past working out of the garage, so this is an exciting opportunity to join an early team in a fast-paced and competitive space. Our iOS app is in Swift and an Android release is in the pipeline.

For more info please email me at sean -at- beet -dot- ly :)

Very cool! The reference to Comedy of Errors is a bit misplaced, however, as the play is set in Greece.

The clips are stored individually on our end and played in sequence in the app (this allows for easy scrubbing/segmenting of series of clips, as well as things like watching friends' updates as they post videos). The YouTube compilation is all the clips exported from the app and then I put some music in the background.

I've been doing something similar for the past few months[0], but via an app I made specifically for this kind of thing[1]. It's really cool to be able to play back my montage, and there really is a sort of voyeuristic pleasure from watching other people's "lifecasts."

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izZkCTBI3Bo [1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/beet-for-moments/id960913398...

I'm going to be honest and admit that I'm still not entirely comfortable with calculating this metric. I've just been going into Google Analytics and dividing our weekly "Users" graph by the previous week, and then averaging all those percentages together. Same for monthly growth. I'm assuming, from people pointing out errors, that this is not the correct way of calculating growth?

Regardless, we've seen significant and consistent increases in traffic, but I'd definitely like to not sound like an idiot (or worse, have my errors be decried as misrepresentation), in the future.

Glad you like the site! We are all Chapman students. The whole reason we started the site was actually because we all had horrible experiences renting properties when we transferred here last fall, and found out there weren't really any resources to help college students.