Ymmv, but I will never use Quill for a production project again.
We started using Quill 1.x around 2016, I initially liked it a lot. Jason proactively reached out to me when I first tweeted about considering Quill, and he was helpful when I had questions about the implementation.
Fast forward to 2019, we were running into some bugs, Quill 1.x was in maintenance mode, and 2.0 was effectively undocumented [1]. I reached out to Jason on Twitter [2] to get a sense for the timeline, and he basically told me to get lost. (Also his company Slab now blocks me on Twitter, though I imagine he just meant to block me from his personal account.)
Everyone has stressful days, especially when building a startup, so maybe that was just a bad time for me to reach out. My best guess is that they were focused on their own company (fair!) and barely had the time to maintain Quill for their own internal usage, let alone release it as open source. If that's the case, I wish they'd been upfront about it.
5 years later, Quill v2 is finally live. I'm glad to see Slab is still around, and I hope they have the bandwidth to publicly maintain Quill going forward. But if you're thinking about using this in production, I would push on what their commitment is to supporting it, and have a plan for if they stop responding.
(Jason, if you're on this thread, no hard feelings, water under the bridge. Feel free to ignore or chime in with your own perspective.)
No experience with Jason, but I have to say I’ve spent waaay too much time reading the Quill code trying to figure out how to patch around weird behavior. Which is frustrating because that’s what a RTE library (vs roll your own) is supposed to be. Not sure about v2, but the v1 code is just not very well architected.
There are basic features we’ve held off on implementing for fear that it will lead to a million little bugs.
The Delta format is the best thing about Quill by far. But I’d advise anyone looking for more than bold/underline/italics to use prose mirror.
Storyworth is a meaningful business with a lean team and a big emphasis on work/life balance. We’re looking for experienced, full-stack engineers with strong product skills who are interested in flexible hours (20-30 hours/week) with good pay.
Storyworth helps people record their family stories and print them in beautiful hardcover books. We’re profitable with no need to fundraise. We’re a small team by choice, with low overhead and few meetings. Everyone is remote and works flexible hours, including our leadership team.
We’re hiring a couple of engineers who enjoy building products end to end, from the UI to the database query. We’re looking for optimistic, self-motivated people, who value working at the top of their craft AND having time for the other things they care about. Our stack is Python (Tornado), Mongo, Svelte and Tailwind.
We rarely have open roles, so if this sounds interesting, please read the full role description and follow the instructions to apply:
I'm a friend of Nick's and have been following Storyworth for like 10 years.
This is a great opportunity for a product engineer that has kids, a life, a band, or something like that.
It's not "you have a 0.01% chance of becoming a billionaire" but "you have a 100% chance of making a great living doing work that's meaningful with good people".
Huh I was not expecting to find something that matched the work environment I was looking for, so much gung-ho mania out there. A couple of my friends worked at Wonderbly, which at first glance looks to be a similar business model & is similarly swell in terms of culture & ethics. I'll shoot over an application.
I tried to be a customer, but alas the family member who I bought it for was reluctant to revisit her childhood. Some traumatic memories she preferred to leave behind.
Storyworth was very understanding and refunded me promptly, which I appreciated. Definitely seems like a great company.
Thanks for the kind comment. While I'm sorry that the service wasn't the right fit for your family member, I'm glad that our support team handled it gracefully.
We’re looking for a full-stack engineer to join us at StoryWorth (www.storyworth.com).
This role is a good fit for you if you want to work on a meaningful consumer product, and if you work best with a lot of responsibility on a small team.
We’re a service that helps people record their family stories and print them in beautiful hardcover books. We have raised a seed round, have paying customers who love us, and are on track to be profitable.
You’ll be taking over the core engineering of the site, scaling it as we grow and implementing major new features. Because of this, we need someone with significant engineering experience (3-5 years full time work). You should be comfortable Python, Javascript, HTML and CSS. Bonus points if you have mobile experience and an interest in design.
Our development process is very collaborative. We'll wireframe a new feature together, you'll put together an end-to-end prototype, and we'll iterate from that. We care more about clean maintainable code than domain expertise. Our stack includes Python (Tornado), Mongo, Swift, Heroku, Stripe, Twilio & Mailgun.
If you want to apply, email me a short note about why this posting caught your attention and we’ll go from there.
I can’t wait to hear from you!
-Nick
nick@storyworth.com
PS: Unfortunately we can’t sponsor a visa at this time, but we’re open to remote candidates if you’re a particularly good fit. Also, this role likely isn’t right for you if you graduated in the past year or recently completed a hacker school.
It's hard to overstate how much easier the Twilio API has made it for developers to interact with SMS and phones.
When I first built StoryWorth, it only worked over email because I thought voice recording would be too complex (both to use and to implement).
However, users kept asking for it so I finally bit the bullet... and it was way easier than I expected. Using the Twilio API, I had voice recordings over the phone working within days.
The team is also super friendly. Less than a month after our launch, someone reached out to me and they wrote about our company on their blog:
You're absolutely right, you could do this yourself. In practice though, I've found that people really like the questions we suggest, and the fact that we automatically send the questions, reminders, etc. It just makes things easier, and therefore more likely to happen.
As for the personal touch, the question is really just a prompt to trigger a meaningful conversation which might otherwise not have happened.
I love this idea. I actually had an idea in a somewhat similar space. I'm pretty sure I'll never actually do it so I'll share.
I thought it would be cool to offer a service to store family history in some super long-lasting acrylic. Maybe laser etch binary into the block or something like that?
Oooh, like a family history version of Han Solo in carbonite :)
I do think the printed books give it some of that longevity. They may not last 1000 years, but I love the idea that someone's great-great-great-grandchild could read their stories a couple of hundred years from now.
yep, just like that lol. No doubt the book is a great idea, but I always saw the "carbonite" option as a high end option. Books for regular people, eternity for those who can afford it. Anyways, best of luck with your service, it really sounds great!
As a long time reader, I'm hesitant to post a promotion on HN, so I want to give a little more context. Just last week one of our customers called me after her mom passed away, to thank us for all the stories she had gotten through StoryWorth. So while it is my company, I see first hand how it helps people connect with their families and how much it means to them.
I hope you don't mind me sharing it here today, but appreciate your feedback either way.
+1 for StoryWorth — a few members of my family have really taken to it, and one answers the questions each week. My sister and I are learning fun stories about our parents which would probably never otherwise come up in conversation with them.
STORYWORTH (YC, seed) | San Francisco, CA | Full stack web engineering lead
StoryWorth (www.storyworth.com) is a service that makes it super easy to record family stories. We're launched and have paying customers. We've been covered in the NYT and recently swept the RootsTech Innovator Challenge.
We're a team of 4 – technical founder (myself), community, marketing and iOS eng. You'd be joining us as the full stack web lead, taking over development of new features from me. Our stack is Python (Tornado) and Mongo on Heroku (+Stripe, Twilio, Mailgun...).
This role is for you if you're a generalist looking for a lot of responsibility on a small team, and want to work on a meaningful consumer product with a real business model.
If that sounds like you, get in touch at nick@storyworth.com.
I would love for a portion of my Spotify subscription to be discretionary, so I could proactively reward bands I love. In fact, I would gladly pay $2-5 extra a month for this feature.
Here's how it could work. Every month, I'd get an email with the top 20 artists I listened to that month (stats! fun!). By default, my contribution goes to my most listened artist. I don't need to do a thing.
If I want, I can manually go in and change the contribution to another artist – say I listened to the new Kanye album a ton, but would rather give my extra dollars to my second-most-listened, way-less-famous artist.
I believe a lot of people get real personal value out of supporting artists they believe in. Right now, the best way to do this is to go to shows and buy merch.
Optional donations as describe above are an opportunity for Spotify to increase the amount of money spent on music, while generating lots of goodwill from users and artists alike.
We started using Quill 1.x around 2016, I initially liked it a lot. Jason proactively reached out to me when I first tweeted about considering Quill, and he was helpful when I had questions about the implementation.
Fast forward to 2019, we were running into some bugs, Quill 1.x was in maintenance mode, and 2.0 was effectively undocumented [1]. I reached out to Jason on Twitter [2] to get a sense for the timeline, and he basically told me to get lost. (Also his company Slab now blocks me on Twitter, though I imagine he just meant to block me from his personal account.)
Everyone has stressful days, especially when building a startup, so maybe that was just a bad time for me to reach out. My best guess is that they were focused on their own company (fair!) and barely had the time to maintain Quill for their own internal usage, let alone release it as open source. If that's the case, I wish they'd been upfront about it.
5 years later, Quill v2 is finally live. I'm glad to see Slab is still around, and I hope they have the bandwidth to publicly maintain Quill going forward. But if you're thinking about using this in production, I would push on what their commitment is to supporting it, and have a plan for if they stop responding.
(Jason, if you're on this thread, no hard feelings, water under the bridge. Feel free to ignore or chime in with your own perspective.)
[1] https://github.com/quilljs/quill/issues/2435
[2] https://twitter.com/nickbaum/status/1177240103925796865