It's an implementation of the 'Library of Babel', as described by Borges in his short story of the same name. It is a library of every possible permutation of a limited alphabet, of books 1,312,000 characters long. The FAQ page [1] and the GitHub readme [2] explain it in much more detail.
A companion tool for the space sim game Elite Dangerous — useless to anyone that doesn't play the game. I have had a couple of donations from kind users.
I have recently implemented a fairly complex workflow editor [1] at Northflank (https://northflank.com) using react-flow and elkjs. They make for a very powerful and flexible combination, great for our needs.
I agree that the Heroku developer experience has been second to none. I'm a front-end & DX engineer at Northflank and we're working hard to evolve and create a next-gen iteration of the Heroku experience anchored around 12 Factor Applications in a Kubernetes/cloud native era. We're getting very close, come and see for yourself: https://northflank.com. Some key features:
* As simple as `git push` to build & deploy services
* One-click addons for Postgres, Mongo, Redis, MySQL and more
* A generous free tier to get developers on board with minimal friction
* Great out of the box observability
* The option to set up pipelines for more complex build/preview/release workflows
This please, a thousand times! We're in the midst of a complex transition from Heroku, where we relied heavily on Review Apps for getting stakeholder feedback and QA'ing complex data model changes, to a k8s-on-EKS setup where we have a Helm chart that can duplicate our normal deploy in isolated namespaces for previewing new feature branches based on Github Actions.
Our data cloning and routing needs are rather custom (white labels on top of feature branch releases, with complex fixture-loading processes), so I don't know that we'd make a great initial customer, but there are so many companies out there that should be using preview apps aggressively and don't know what they're missing. If you can make this happen in a modern environment without people needing to know what Argo and Flux are, or how to make a "for" loop in Helm, it could be a significant differentiator - and also provide a lower barrier to entry where prospective customers use you first for low-impact preview environments, then start using you for production as well.
Yes, agreed with the need for improved preview workflows. For current GitOps offerings, you need a YAML degree to implement at any reasonable scale.
We currently have several customers using our API + Typescript client to provision preview environments. Create temporary databases, spawn container builds, spawn job to import dump, run migrations, deploy x micro-services, run QA and finally spin down.
The perfect situation is where the preview environments are roughly aligned with staging and production workflows. So you don't need to maintain two different systems.
Our first iteration of GitOps and template driven IaC is releasing soon. I would love to discuss your situation and how we can improve our offering. email: will at northflank.com.
> You can have one free project on your user account, and the resources you create within it will be limited. You will not be billed for any usage within a free project, but you must add a card to your account for verification first.
not having to add credit card info before using the free tier is one of the main reasons for Heroku being so popular with students and toy projects, truly a friction-free experience.
Heroku also started out with that generous free tier and look where we are now. Make sure your business works and is solid and protected against abusers before you start handing out free tiers because that's the hard part of anything free.
The decline of Heroku is a shame, they were the first to really make cloud accessible to all.
Over at Northflank (https://northflank.com), we're trying to continue that trend and great developer experience is our main priority. We address many of the same points you mention - simply `git push` to build and deploy (using Dockerfiles or Buildpacks), instant free DNS & TLS, one-click addons (Postgres, Mongo, Redis...), environment variables inherited from databases, and much much more - all with sensible pricing.
Code: https://github.com/tdjsnelling/microtype Demo: https://tdjsnelling.github.io/microtype/test/from-cdn/
Even better, there is the new CSS `hyphens: auto;`. Browser & language support is not yet 100% though.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/hyphens