Have you guys heard of Dfinity?
Hi all,
Long time lurker here. Just wondering if anyone here has heard of Dfinity and is developing on that network? (Link to project below)
I've been boot strapping my side project (collectible card trading marketplace), and one of the things I always do first when I set up new projects is to setup CI/CD practices in order to optimize my time spent on the project since the start. This usually involves:
- Creating Gmail, Terraform, AWS, Github account
- Setting up git pushes so that the code pushes auto deploys to a server
- Setting up a Code as Infrastructure repo, and auto deploying any code as infrastructure changes into AWS resources
This makes it so I can iterate alot faster from the beginning but usually takes me more than 2 months to set up correctly.
However I just ran into this project called Dfinity, which albeit a different paradigm on database technologies, is a decentralized protocol that streamlines the development process by alot. What took me 2 months only took me 30 minutes in Dfinity. As my app doesn't have a preference between centralized vs decentralized technology as long as it works, I've been leaning toward using Dfinity for most of my side projects.
So just wanted to ask the community what their thoughts were on this project, could it be very useful to indie developers? I'm not super versed in decentralized technologies or blockchains so wanted to get this community's feedback
It looks great, and a great fit for a project I'm starting. I tried their tutorial but had errors, which put me off a bit - thinking maybe too early days for the technology. I'm not going to give up on it tho, will give it another go and see how I get on.
Interested to hear other people experiences..
It’s been a couple of weeks since your post. Are you still using the dfinity platform and if so, do you still like it?
Yes! I've been building on it, staying up till 3 am lots of nights for last couple of weeks building on it.
What I dont like so far is that there isn't an official bridge to the normal internet, so normal APIs that we're familiar with currently don't work with Dfinity without a hacky workaround.
It makes it difficult to build consumer apps that charge money, because I wanted to use PayPal checkout or Stripe checkout. I still can, but I had to hack my own infrastructure for that. Also support for financial transactions within the Internet Computer network is still very new, so all in all there is not many ways you can monetize a business on it yet.
That being said, I am having a great experience developing an app, since im only focusing on writing business logic and not building 20 pieces of DevOp functions to do basic deployments and scalability. Although, I have not yet had an opportunity to deploy to prod to battle test anything yet, so I have not been able to test the core selling point of Dfinity (at least to me) - whether or not it can scale and sustain huge amounts of traffic without infra management and involvement from me. I hope to test this in the coming months.
all in all, im quite happy with it knowing that new features are on the way, because they are definitely needed (assuming it can scale the way it advertises - if it doesn't, I'll be quite sad with it)
I’m very interested to hear how it scales myself. I’m also interested in what type of applications best align with the architecture. From a dev standpoint not having to be concerned about the backend certainly makes things simpler but it’s hard for me to believe that how the data is organized and accessed on the backend doesn’t matter, that it works equally well no matter the use case. Perhaps it’s not, it’s just good enough for all use cases.
Is someone working on a bridge to the normal Internet?
Looks like these guys can make Internet Computer apps visible to the regular Internet. https://fleek.co/ Also saw on Twitter where this will soon be available to everyone