Can’t make up my mind
I’ve got a side project since January. It is intended to be used by companies as a framework for fabricating tech interviews and maintain tech interviews. (It’ll need a log in system, database, etc) I’ve never done such a thing before.
I’m a frontend developer by day and I’m about to become a backend one by night. 😬
I’m considering using Firebase or Graphcool’s Prisma to get bootstrapped with the backend. But I can’t make up my mind, which I should choose.
How do you tackle these technologolical questions?
Kristof, I respectfully disagree with Caleb. You mention that this is a side project, so I assume that you have limited time and that you have to take care of everything alone: you therefore probably need to find 20/80 Pareto solutions to all your needs, making 20% of the effort for 80% of the reward.
Using Firebase rather than having to learn backend development does sound like a huge time saver to me.
And you can always making the change towards your own backend later on, IF your project is extremely successful and Firebase doesn't fit your needs anymore.
In the two other possible cases (project not successful, or project successful but Firebase still fits your needs), you will not have lost any time on learning and building a backend.
The choice is yours, but I wanted to share this alternative opinion :-)
Thank you for your answer, Kevin!
Yes, it’s right that I have limited time to work on my idea unfortunately next to my daily job. Therefore, as you said, I want to minimize the time to learn the backend and this is why I started to look for backend as a service solutions.
Definitely I’ll hold a hackathon for myself at a weekend to check out Firebase! I have already tried out Graphcool’s Prisma, I really much liked it, but it seemed to me that there is a steep learning curve there as well.
Thanks again!
Oh yes, I was using Firebase as an example but Iam not advising Firebase over Prisma, I do not know Prisma. I used Firebase as a proxy for BaaS! :-)
Good luck!
PS: If you check Firebase, look at the new Firebase Firestore, which is in Beta but probably not for long. It solves a lots of the issues people had with the real-time database, and is a very similar product to MongoDB, with some differences.
Yep, I am going to check that out as well.
After the hackathon I’ll be more sure, which to choose I guess! 🙂
Thanks for your help Kevin!
Thanks for your help!
I'd recommend staying away from those services. Chances are, you'll spend more time coding and debugging around the service then solving problems directly related to your product.
You can pick up something like Rails and roll your own solutions fairly quickly. You can then deploy to your favorite service, and iterate from there.
What does this product do exactly? Is it suppose to be like Coderpad?
Thank you for your answer Caleb!
Well, I considered using those services first, cause I have some JS knowledge, which I could use there, but you may be right, I might need a more easy-to-go stack at the beginning.
Answering your question, yes, the product would serve the same user needs, but it would be a bit different. It would rather be more similar to what Hackerrank and Codility offer. It's supposed to help businesses build up their technical interview rounds on the site, and create a sendable link to the whole interview process.
Do you have experience bootstrapping Rails projects?
The Rails projects i've worked on have been on the larger side. Rails provides a lot out of the box, and the Rails community has built plenty of gems for common use cases such as user auth.
If you're comfortable in JS there are plenty of frameworks out there that would suite your needs.