Supper Club × Self Hosted Backend-as-a-service with Brandon Roberts

those things are built on top of React itself or or if you if you're thinking that, like, SvelteKit, those things are built on top of Svelte. But Angular kind of It's packaged all those things together as far as, like, routing or and forms and even HTTP client, you know, in the I think in the more of the web ecosystem. People maybe use or something like that. But, More familiar with, like, Firebase, you can look at it as an alternative to Firebase that's 100% open source. That's mostly some of the things that people mostly associate it with.

Angular is my choice. And then Remix is, quickly coming up the coming up the ranks. I really like what they're doing on the Remix team, and I've been doing some, like I said, cool experiments with Yes. I will I will take that as a compliment. I know there there are others out there, but,

Overall, yeah, my my experiments with the remix have been super positive. What what's let's stick into Angular maybe for a second. What's what's your favorite part about working in Angular? Because I think Wes and I,

Angular has its own client,

framework, which is a set of, like, app, component component

Or which, tools to use it when building with Angular because a lot of that stuff gets provided out of the box.

There's very clear

So that's I think that's where the the plus about Angular comes in. They're they they've definitely improved on the, like, the component model, perspective on, like, just building at that that part of it. But, but allow these hooks into native platforms like Ios and Android And even PWAs, We're writing code, so in with whatever your stack of choice is, No. I have I have not. I have not touched Flutter yet,

which I think is a is good for the Angular ecosystem.

for your data that's using any Post

developers. They kind of use that. Right? Just as you mentioned is,

projects to No.

Flutter is one of those. Yeah. Yeah. That's a a blind spot for us. Yeah. 1 of the,

to help you,

Projects to Yeah. Don't stray too far from light. For web framework to to look at these days, so I'm pretty pretty entrenched there. I'm always curious about Flutter Flutter myself just because you do. You hear I I've I've seen more people talk about it than I have

build out those,

build out those quicker. And they also use like I said, have the Ionic, getting people's impressions about that and, you can use it,

framework as far as development goes. So, Yeah. It's a law like, many probably what? Like, 7, 8 years ago? You know? Like, if that was many, many moons ago. Yeah. So the the Part I guess, it's it's 2 parts for me. Like, part of it working with Angular is, like, the community is excellent. There's a lot of supportive people there,

Using it, and I got to maybe we got to find a flutter expert, Wes, at some point to come on because I got to Yeah. I got to get the scoop there. Mhmm. There's

what's ionic? I know. I know what it is, but sometimes I questions to people like you don't know. Now I'm asking for the the for your audience. What is Ionic?

engineers on our team is a is a Flutter GDE, so I'm sure he can talk about Flutter Flutter at length,

circles in web development, and sometimes circles overlap and then sometimes circles are like Totally outside of of what the syntax circle is, and I think intelligent on call scheduling and escalation. Alright. Welcome, Brandon. Thanks so much for coming How are you doing today? I'm good. Thanks for having me. Yeah, absolutely.

which is which is good. So we want to like I said, we want

Yeah. So, Oh, that's cool. They had some interesting challenges that they were running into with, like, merging data from different Like I said, the database service inside of Fright is is there is available in Good to see you. Yeah. We just We just moved, so I'm, after this call, I'm gonna go start ripping up carpet to get my office going. There you go. I was gonna say, I was looking at the you know, they have those things in the In the show notes about Bluetooth devices and things like this, you're just going against the grain. I see it. Yeah.

recently, things like that. So, What What is what's it for? Like, why did they fork that? I don't I don't know the exact the exact politics around that, but I'm go I'm gonna I'm gonna to be able to, you know, cross front, like I said, from getting up and running with Docker to,

Android also, if you want like, say, you wanted to integrate more natively, Kind of offload some of some, maybe, performance intensive tasks or things like that to the serverless functions where it It behaves just like,

the framework

and I think it fits well into those ecosystems.

as far as helping you get up and running and And that sort of thing. But at least for the framework itself,

SDKs that are being used. Like I said, we also have ones for Apple and, I definitely I've seen more traction there as far as usage goes,

Yeah. It's the only Angular State library that I've heard of. So Okay. Well that's that's probably saying something.

And native web I believe, but, yeah, we definitely gear geared towards more,

But, but, yeah, those are the the spaces that I've seen Angular kind of, shine in that way. Not to say that it's, I think that Angular, you know, could use its own. But, I mean, me, personally, I think Angular could use its own, like, Next. Js or SvelteKit, that type of, framework to provide more integration there, but, I think it it's good for what it does. Yeah. I think more and more, we're we're all kind of We've been, kind of in a, like, a react haze for so long where, you know, if you you need state application state, you're picking one of 10,000 different state libraries or something. So I think we're all starting to get a little bit of fatigue with that, and it's like, what is

people have to make or decisions, I say, that people have to make when building web apps and kind of, look at the the configuration to get it up and running and get access to all the the, services. Databases being one of them, but Authentication and the other ones also. So want to want to give you the flexibility,

being integrated more into the platforms.

takes a lot of the opinions that, things. So I think that's probably the the quickest way because You'll go down a rabbit hole if you just try to, like, then it's, help you develop it faster in in those native environments. So that's my my definition of what Ionic is. That's good. And is Angular your,

Angular and, and also have a bunch of OAuth providers that where if you wanna connect, use authenticate using Twitter or or Twitch or Google or Facebook or even one of those, All those are open source, and a lot of those have been contributed by the community also,

it'll be, like I said, branching out for me to to try Flutter or some of the other Other ones in that space. Ionic was the. Let's talk about that for a second. What's it's definitely always, like, a wow example. So it's it's awesome that that exists and is easy to do. Yeah. That was yeah. Those are a few of my, like, few of my go to things. It's like, Of course, I want the database part of it.

It's that's such a a great take. And,

application where different people could, like, collaborate within the same space.

Or uploading files through the store service.

they under Undervalue may be just how cool some of that stuff is. And then the moment that you write a a real time chat app or something, you're just like, I can do this? It's not that

trying to migrate to this from, like, Firebase then, and you wanted that needed that real time aspect of it, then that part's definitely available there.

most of the anything that AppRight, produces is like system events, can be air funneled through the web through the WebSocket there. So, if you want to, like, spread them out some more or distribute it more. Oh, that's cool. That's Your data structure is, in the terms of what we call a collection.

So the cloud functions are are a way to do that. As I mentioned before, you can investigating there to see how far I could get with the the Remix router. Yeah. I think they have the right idea for the web fundamentals

To that particular database or that record, whether it gets, created or updated or deleted, you get events for those.

like we mentioned, database, if you enter, your battery just running out, while your computer's doing nothing, fans, those type of things, but, like, performance issues, if you were having those, they were doing, like, video editing and that sort of thing. Mhmm. Mhmm. It's like those some of those things just, like, go away if you just upgrade. So that was that was my pitch to them on the On the new Max.

so that you're not having to do all that Processing through your you know, like, on the front end itself, you can kinda offload that and kinda get the results back when it's when it's finished.

hackathon project that I I witnessed. Just it's always fun to see people build things out in the wild and see what they're what they're gonna kinda kinda kinda build together with those. So another thing that we can that we kinda talked about before was Cloud functions and, a inside of a modal, inside of a pop up. Mhmm. It's true. Alright. I definitely ran into that with Zoom was just fine trying to find a setting. Like, there should be some default for this setting, and it was, like, buried buried within a modal, but I do have I am planning on, looking at that at some point. But like I said, I'm mostly sticking to there's No shortage of web

All those things are available through the through the real time API. So, like I said, if you wanted to if you're looking at this as, I'll you said you said it, not me, so I guess I can I can go along with it? Yeah. No. Absolutely.

The real time part is, like I said, the real real time aspect for chat a p chat apps Or even anything that you're that you want, like, multiuser, Is that is that right? Today, everything is is self hosted. So you would you would take a you use your, like I said, Provider of choice that supports Docker.

And I've built some, like I said, some apps that like, I I built a real time chat app in a few few different languages to kinda Kinda tap into that real time API, which is which is nice. Yeah. Yeah. That's just something I I feel like people,

Yeah. What about your your, your text editor theme and font? Okay. So I my text editor is Versus Code,

we ask people what font they're using? Or, like, I don't know. Yeah. Whatever. Yeah. I, I use whatever it whatever the theme or whatever the operating system Our theme, shipped with, so that's what I'm that's what I'm sticking with. I don't have all like, the ones with the fancy ligatures, and I don't wanna look like I'm writing cursive when I'm writing merging real time data from different people's, stick it to the standard setup.

More, like, diverse,

Let's move to the next section,

for

So I built a little app where you just type, like, Wes's office and hit print and it prints out, like, 30 of them. And then just went around slapping them on boxes. And the movers loved Because they were to read. They were huge. Yeah. Easy to read. They're white stand. They stand out very clearly. And, like, there was there was not a ton of questions on those boxes as to where they go.

So we we just moved. And, Like, instead of like, I cannot, like, write my name. I don't know what is wrong with my hand, but, like, if I try to chicken scratch with a Sharpie on the box,

share GraphQL and REST APIs

No one can read it. So I built an app, super, super happy. I'm curious what your streaming setup is here because you've got your audio sounds great. Your video looks good. You have a, like, a blue background, which I'm not sure if it's real or not And for it's a green screen?

a seasoned set up for us, like, Standard authentication, which is e email and password, but we also support, like, anonymous authentication basically do it, in a couple of clicks.

and also block people sometimes, but just for fun. But, yeah, if you wanna resonated with me as, like, a as a back end developer back end PHP developer.

or especially web web stuff. What about what's one piece of advice you would have for a beginner in web development? I would say find a

Just being able to take their responses

free tier.

Yeah. Yeah.

YouTube and, like, newsletters that I sign up for,

We can transition into that if you want. Sure. I'll. My plug was gonna be,

I just recently changed the,

dive deep and try to learn it all yourself, which some people can do that. But I think Getting involved with the community that can help you and, you know, help you push forward is is a good way to go. Nice. Last question we have here. Is there Anything you're really excited about in the future of web development?

Yeah. Your work's done.

Because all you have to do is point Hasura to your data source and let it auto generate your GraphQL when was, like, the last version you worked in, Wes? It was, like, 1.3 or 1.4, somewhere around there. Yeah. I think 1.4.

And don't forget to subscribe in your podcast player how how is that a

It just takes a moment and you can get started. And you can get real time GraphQL interface

Google, r s the RSS reader that got killed a few years ago.

no Bluetooth microphones

and Maybe that's the one. I've used that one before.

I don't know what font it is I'm using. I've been using I've used,

no AirPods rule for the show for because the AirPod, your

authorization

Or drop a review if you like this show.

and you'll get 3 months of Hasura cloud standard free tier. Only the first 100 people get this, so please,

and it's really super good. I think it has options to be fancy, but, Have you done any Flutter yourself?

I need to. Yeah. I'm not as pro as everybody else. I've got the I'm the only one using Bluetooth headphones for this. Everyone else is wired.

API.

instantly. So head on over to hasura.infoforward/

I talked about, and deploy AppRight without having to mess with any of your own servers or Things like that. So and that's one way to do it. And with that one click or or that that setup, you you get a database, you get all of the Yep. The the features, the auth, all that stuff? Yeah. You get a fully fully up and running even MagicLinks, basically, any operation that happens on a database, if you have access Any anything that

try to see when stuff comes across my, A YouTube feed,

We have,

baked in so you can secure access to all of your data sources, databases, or any other external GraphQL

are my my choices there. Right on. Yeah. I think that's a I think there's Pretty strong endorsement

gone gone down the full keyboard rabbit Oh, just yet. I'm beginning to think that, like, the keyboard rabbit hole is a myth because every single person that we interview,

What are your resources, or how do you stay up to date? My resources are Twitter. I see what are the hiding now. I do I do use Twitter to I do try to follow people,

Postgres family of database.

But A lot of people don't use fancy fonts is what we're we're finding. We might need to Yeah. I think West and I have been very happy with ours in terms of all of those. Yeah. Yeah. We've been super, and then add complex authorization

M1 MacBook Pro.

All those things that you have to think about on the old Mac, like, those things go away. Like, That's may maybe in a couple months ago now where, I know someone was building, like, a mind mapping, there, but, yeah, the web and Flutter, in that way and not have to like I said, it only handles the back end,

starts with an m, or the,

for a full archive of all of our shows.

and just, like, invest in that community.

As is in return, you know, redirects and, And, also, the other parts, if you add a user or delete a user, basically, and if you're, like, executing functions what the this Database would look like, if it was meant for developers and not for DevOps. So not not throwing any shade. So important. Not throwing any shade at DevOps people, but,

is the issue because the Bluetooth microphones

rules Down to the individual row and column level, you can also simultaneously

like all good developers do, because they have this, like, label printer that prints, like, thermal labels, like, huge 4 by 6 Stickers.

Yeah. I know.

these days, I think Twitter is probably my my go to place. Twitter,

that, like, matches up with how the way matches up with how you like to build things, Yes. It is real. It's just a blue blue wall behind me, which is my, Of course, my color pick of choice for the for the office here.

What about, keyboard? I can't. Now on the keyboard front, I'm just using, like, a standard standard Apple Mac, keyboard. I don't have the fancy provides a lot of that for you. If we think of, like, How,

back in p t PHP developer before I moved to the front end, so a lot of those things that Oh, yeah. That kinda resonate with Remix,

where we the we'll call them supper club dessert questions. This is a set of questions we ask, similar to everyone that comes on the show.

You have granular

for Twitter as being, like, a good place to learn considering how many people say that that's, like, the place where they get their news,

me as an,

Developer community

I used my coding font on all of our moving boxes.

That's what I was using. I just recently switched to the night owl thing, which I think Which I don't I don't think, which was, created by Sarah Drasner.

Yeah. Yeah. The operator mono is the fanciest of pump.

in the know on Twitter and, About,

Free trial. You can use the coupon code, try Hasura,

slides or things like that, but I hadn't used it in my editor. I use one called mono Monolisa, But on other side of that, if you're if you're not familiar with what Firebase is and kind of that ecosystem,

Oh, man.

is, I was used to doing back in the day. Like, I used to be, more developers and,

You can even have your own GraphQL API sources bringing into Hasura

that's real.

Because let's face it, building and maintaining your own GraphQL servers

are always sound like, a tin can. No. I don't I don't want I don't wanna be in the in that And that crew, if I don't if I if I can, avoid it. So to build those cloud functions.

because I was using, like, the whatever comes out of the box with Versus Code, the blandest option available.

you know, every single person uses the Mac keyboard. Or are you like that? Yeah. And yeah. It's it's wild. You know? I'm not sure there's any overlap in people that have mechanical keyboards and people that write code.

and create Styles of APIs from one configuration to support new and existing architectures.

keyboards that make the nice clicky click Sounds. I haven't I haven't gone full.

And, like I said, I got a I got a pretty pretty standard set up here. I got, Remix router, and that's mainly because Right. They are bringing a lot of the things that, it also has indexes which, kinda help with the performance aspect of it, but a little more sure they're like I said, using MariaDB under the hood. So it is using a relational database under the hood, but, you kinda have that NoSQL feel to it to where you're not writing queries many different, languages whether it be Node A nebulous term to say, but, getting involved in that community or even, like, through the Angular community in open source. And I think that was really helpful, like, for me in in my career as far as growing and being around Like I said, a set of services that allows you to get up and running really quickly to kinda build build up, basically, whatever you want. I know that's

API within minutes.

Anyways, I use my coding font on that, and people are like, okay, Wes. You need to Google it with this code.

Head on over to syntax.fm Like, I I don't know, with actual design shops or design experience because it's a totally different experience that we always joke about, like, you know, like Zoom. Zoom

No. No. No. No. No. Your your subs, like, was one of the most pro that we've had.

web developer Montessori? or even username and password is pretty easy to set up there. If I wanted to connect it to Twitch, I could do that.

heart is with, But, yeah, I think well, I don't wanna give away my my plug.

I'll check that out. Yeah. Like Mona Lisa. I used,

It's time consuming, and it's difficult. And with HESARA, you no longer need to do that. You can save half of that time That you would be spent building your API and maintaining it, and you can put that into actually doing real work. So sign up for HasuraCloud's

And the first question we have here is what computer are you using? I am using an Apple,

We have we have and manage our own API, and we're a small company level up tutorials. And,

Cloud Functions, but, like I said, primarily,

like, an a node

and the the repos are all public. Mhmm.

every single time I I check out one of these tools or or do maybe, like, a a little small demo project. I'm always thinking like, man, I really hate having to

directly to,

Nice. And there's a lot of great examples here too, We both have some fancy fonts, but I think Wes is is a little bit fancier.

that endpoint. Is this being done primarily from the head on over there right now and give this a try. Thanks so much for Hessara for sponsoring.

Web web technology underneath, and we use, like,

give you an whole GraphQL API and authentication and everything on top of it. This is not part of the ad read. I'm just saying, like, it's starting to become more popular where, like, you have your database, But then you have a layer on top that makes,

the client side of the the code? Or is this or I I should say even, like, now the UI of the code because UIs are Often, server side as well. But is this being done from the the UI of the code, or is this being done from,

being able to spend that up quickly for, Like I said, people who just wanna build something quickly And but that's that's not the only place that you could deploy it, though. Basically, any anywhere you anywhere you can deploy anywhere you have access to Docker Compose,

SDKs that They work on the client side or on the server side. So if you're using the the web SDK, it's gonna use, you know, standard,

getting started,

and then it's like it's the similar similar setup on the server side. If you just wanna use kinda like AppRight as a like a bridge between 2 servers, So that then one of the new ones. I I really I really like it. Nice and fast for you? Yeah. It's It was I was talking to someone who was still, like, on an older older MacBook, and I was trying to convince them to use 1. And my my pitch to them was so it provides a lot of those tools that are packaged up. And I I've been in mostly worked with Angular in in environments where they don't want to run a lot of that locally That experience with using AppRight, we we did throw around a pitch that, So the rest APIs are there if you wanted to, you know, Handle those directly, but you what people usually do is, like I said, use the SDKs. And we have SDKs for many different, it integrating gaining, the SDKs handle all that.

to talk Talk back and forth with and set and and query data, all your all of the stuff that you're used to. Yeah. Definitely. And that's one of the one of the nice things about, AppRight is that you can.

like a whole API and makes things a lot easier to, upright. Would that be

Worry about all of these the the managing and and authoring our own API when, really, what I care about

as much. Yeah. I totally see the appeal because

crafting man, crafting custom endpoints and Things like that, which you can do, which we can talk about with,

Back end, I guess that doesn't make sense. So I guess it would be a the UI part of the code? Yeah. So the so AppRight has,

I'll I'll post a link to the to the docs in the show notes. But there's a lot of, like, Here's a React to do, a Vue to do, Angular to do, Svelte to do, all with all of the authentication,

developer, so I'd stick to the, you know, stick to the web SDK and Mhmm. Don't have to worry about, like,

I see, like, in the the web SDK

Is the the data, the connections of the data, and how it all relates to each other.

for those of you who are,

and not have to maybe worry about as much back end infrastructure It it lets you do that pretty quickly. It's like I said, if you, you know, push apart or push aside having to learn Docker or maybe maybe Not being a little intimidated by that, but, if you have Docker, like, up and running in your machine or up or on a, like, small server or Something like that. And you basically meet the system requirements. It's like 1 command, and you don't have to it's not something that you really have to, like, handhold my because MySQL got acquired,

So there's a lot of, like, super hyper practical examples. Yeah. For sure. We definitely want to there to be,

once it got acquired. So and with the nature of open source, of course, they was like, well, We don't want it to be controlled by, you know, maybe 1 singular company, so maybe they spun it off like that and wanted to be more, say, more community maintained. Makes sense. Sun Microsystems owns my school. That makes sense. That seems to always happen.

database

and then they maybe they Maybe it was a little less community oriented, Remix router, like I said, mentioned before, it's like a framework whether it be, like, say, angular reactors felt. We got examples for Each one of those, and you can basically slide it in in any one of those with with, a little bit of work. So This is really cool because, like Like, we so we just talked about databases So you can model your and, yeah, That's that's a lot of what I do these days.

queries set all. It it gives you a set of APIs, right, where you can start Or pinging it and and setting data. Is that correct? Yeah. Definitely. The like I said, database is something that, you know, most developers need when they wanna, you know, build an app or store some data MariaDB under the head, and, people are probably more familiar with MySQL.

you know, whatever the kind of the product is or something like that. But the database, to build that. So, Like I said, whether it whether it be, Svelte to keep up to date. I know we had a a hackathon it's, runs Using Docker containers, so a lot of the I like to talk about it maybe in a couple of ways. Like, if you're, available to use, but you can, like I said, can also Expand on some of the the micro surfaces underneath,

Oh, that's cool. So I'm just looking at app right here. And this this is really cool because you spin up But not just not just a database where you're typing

Against those databases underneath. Yeah. We tend

Lair isn't in the back end of this thing. Yeah. So today, it uses,

database service in AppRite lets you, spin that up really quickly. You don't have to write any, you know, database commands or SQL queries for anything like that.

So it uses that today, Then you can use that using API keys and use the the node SDK that we have for there also. So, like I said, me, primarily, I'm a primarily front end,

to be seeing a lot of actually, we did not plan this at all, but one of our Sponsors today, Hasura does that for Postgres. Mhmm.

also so it has a little more flexibility there, but MariaDB is the the default for today. I'm just googling MariaDB because I don't think I've heard that before. It says MariaDB is a community developed commercially supported fork of MySQL.

an app right in a Docker container,

and out of the box, it's going to give you a database.

And, like, they will, like so this thing runs in a Docker container,

and but it's flexible enough in that it can support Different database types. So we roast we recently merged in support for, MongoDB, So those are MariaDB is like a spin off of MySQL.

Sir, my to say that,

it being able to, like being able to use that in different languages of your choice, The developers did, like I said, get the most value out of that, so So it's

AppRight is, see see more shenanigans, you can definitely follow me on Twitter there. So that's my my shameless plug. Nice. We'll make a we'll put a link to that in the show notes. Awesome. Cool. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Really appreciate your time and giving us insight into AppRight. Seems pretty Pretty exciting. I think that a lot of our listeners will give us a spin on one of their next projects. It's pretty cool. So thanks again. Yeah. I can't wait to give this a try. Yeah. Definitely. I always tell people to try it out. You know? Let me know. You can reach out to me directly. You know? Join the Discord. Whichever way We can help you out. I'm I'm around and available. Sec. Well, thanks so much, Brandon. Awesome. Yeah. Thank you. Peace.

A good looking interface, is it it's kind of CMS light, or or how does that,

is functional, but, like, the design it's just like, you gotta click through 8 8 menus or whatever to find anything. Yeah.

emphasis that AppRight has? Is that something that that AppRight cares about as a as a product, I guess? Yeah. Definitely. We are definitely,

developer focused there. Yeah. Yeah. There's such, like, a engineer designed

but it's exposed to, like, a standard WebSocket connection. So deploy those inside of AppRite, and you can write those in many different languages, whether it be Node or Python or Dart, if you're, What can I build and just focus on building rather than making all of those choices? Yeah. For sure. I say that as a maintainer of the state management It's been library also. Yeah. But framework of choice If you're going to build some build an app or a website right now? Yes. It is. My I've been a long time, in the Angular community for a long time, so Angular is still my My choice, and, Regardless of which, like, which SDK you use, what kind of developer, You could that is one option that we are looking into as far as Scale up something like Kubernetes. I think today, if you wanted to scale up, Docker Swarm And so you can if you if you wanna use MongoDB instead of MariaDB, you can use that. And we're looking at adding other databases such as Postgres, underneath, and, of course, we can get into that more. But at a high level, it's it's a set of, for that. So I'll give a give a shout out to that that project, because I would like to see projects like that and, the influence that I think it's having on the the greater web Ecosystem continue to to move forward in other spaces. Yeah. Awesome. Do you have any shameless plugs that you'd like to Sure. Did you give us? My shameless plug is always my Twitter account. You can follow me on Twitter at Brandon t roberts.

You pay for the services you actually use, not the number of the people on your team, which is important because you can scale your incident response team without adding to your bill. You get intelligent

all that kind of factors into I'm not I'm not a pitchman for Ionic, but Ionic is, to me, is a a framework for building mobile and web applications My my my personal, The Flutter and web are, I think, the most popular, and we have support for many like I said, many different runtime, more than I can Think of PHP West. The lizard is like there's a PHP. There's what? There's PHP. There's even Dino examples here, which is like I think that's probably the first time I've seen

There's 6 pop ups deep inside of

by looking at the underlying pieces. Like I said, REST APIs is something that, You know, we didn't didn't invent REST APIs. We didn't invent databases. Mhmm. So those things are, like, transferable knowledge that you can use, to scale out if you if you needed to. But, yours is yours is the best one, though. Alright. Okay. I I I appreciate that, but, That's how I used to get all the information. It just comes comes straight to me, but,

Keeping close to, like, standards, which,

and groups alerts with machine learning, reducing your time to respond. And this means less noise and more personalization for precise notifications where you can take control

So it seems like, and just from the the website alone,

receive a free light step incident response T shirt after firing an alert or incident. So check it out. Are you in need of incident response? Check out lightstep.comforward/syntax.

you consider yourself to be, whether it be front end or back end, we want you to have, like, a similar consistent, like, experience across the board there. So each of each one of the APIs, like, a lot of those a lot of thought has gone into those as far as being back end as a service.

on call scheduling and escalations.

You can get the full context on your service health, active alerts, and who's on call. LightStep incident response immediately pinpoint issues You're primarily, what you're doing is you're connecting to an endpoint, and then you're you're writing these these, requests

because the the good part about it is you can that knowledge transfers. Like, you aren't learning anything in AppRight that you necessarily wouldn't learn, I do mostly in the Angular community, so I maintain at one point, they used the term web native applications to where you can use build native applications using web technologies.

It was like, where do we put this? Just put it o just put it over there. That seems like a good spot. Put in a pop up. Yeah.

how how does I guess the question would be,

how we want the the developers to be able to have that flexibility And I've really enjoyed, using that. So I've been I've been sticking to that one. And for font, stacks and languages like web or, like I said, Python or even .net, and those different ones. So what you would primarily Maps that they were doing inside that app. So that was a pretty cool, like you would normally expect those cloud functions to do,

on declaring incidents automatically notifying the right teams. And you can get unified incident response by seamlessly orchestrating alerts and incident triage with on call scheduling across Slack, Teams, Zoom, desktop, and mobile. So what you'll want to do is head on over to lightstep.comforward/

you can get, like, a good idea that, like, AppRight really cares about

AppRight as as a system? It has

The let's talk about databases a little bit more. You can do real time. Right? Like, I'm thinking back to when I did Firebase stuff, and the real time stuff is super handy. A similar thing with AppRight? For sure. So it, has, real time APIs that and these are available, like, for a client through the client side SDKs,

syntax, and you'll get a free 30 day trial. Listeners of Syntax will also You don't need to write your GraphQL server by hand anymore

and,

thing when it's, Like, clearly been designed by an engineer rather than, like, designed by somebody who is designing for that.

Designed for over their product. Can can you maybe go into a little bit more about,

like,

And to kinda test things out and then deploy it from there to if you just pass in, like, some data that you need for the for the function to run.

connect to your AppRite instance, and, have to make those decisions about which baggages to use which is definitely important if you're whatever. Forget it. Yeah. Vans, forget that. Battery life, you know, forget about

It just seems so cool that you can, like, obviously host this thing yourself,

And from there, you can deploy, or you can use the AppRite deploy command that'll deploy that function, I'll give you the pitch. You can follow me there for MPT Roberts. I talk about sports.

and, like, you always think about functions as serverless functions and

that comes along with it, you know?

like node, then

would be the,

from the AppRight CLI, you can,

of the audience of people using this? Is this, like, a lot of web developers Or is it a lot of, like, native app developers? Because I imagine this would work super well if you're building a a native app and you need, like, An entire back end for your native app. What what do you see, or is it is it kinda across all the board? Yeah. I definitely think there is a good,

But running a function in a Docker container is kind of like a server full function.

To write a function, you can use you can use a few different ways, but, I'll say the most straightforward way is to use the AppRite CLI.

file that comes with AppRight. So it it ships with, like, a standard Docker composed file that you have access to update. So if you wanted to, like, take out the database part of it and connect to, like, some external service that provides, you know, maybe more a more scalable, or React or Angular view or insert your web framework of choice here,

it's a Python based SDK and then you can either run it from the AppRight console itself, or you can run it from the the command line also.

good solid mix of Flutter, they focus on, like, The the app development side of it and kind of hand out hand, database interactions or the real time aspect of it off to AppRight so that, Like I said, there's 1 less thing that you have to worry about building. You could just focus on the front end if the if that's your thing.

where I start looking into Kubernetes?

Administrative commands that you can run from the AppRight console,

You know, we have the normal web SDKs, which obviously you would just install and run those in your your web code, your UI code. But let's So you're you're wanting to work on a function. Like, what what is the what is the workflow of writing a function and deploying it look like? Yeah. So the

more easier approach to do there. And across the board. And, like I said, with the SDKs,

So that's kind of the workflow of how you can build functions and kinda debug them in that way. But if you were using something that we had to use. So Yeah. Of course, you have to run that on those, sorry to be able to do that, so it definitely gives you some flexibility and options to run run those cloud functions there. And, like I said, we talked about Blinn. You can use those, Database service or some of those, you can

to your AppRite instance After you, of course, after you log in to your AppRite instance. So you can deploy it from there, and that's kind of the the loop there. You can deploy it, as a checkbox. I was like, why isn't this just surface Somewhere where I could just set it in, like, forget it, but definitely feel that.

show where we we did some real time, as different run times

If I wanted to Scale

pretty much run all the

A solution there, then you can definitely use that to kinda, Interface with are the SDKs that kinda do all the heavy lifting underneath as far as, like, setting tokens and keys and things like that. So, Remix because they were they said they were gonna bring Remix router to the rest of the web, so I wanted to take them up on that offer, so I did do did do some got it connected to the headphones, Agnostic routing solution for the web.

transcription using Cloud Functions. So and it was a, like I said, a Python

What about,

So it lets you, initialize those from the command line. Initialize your function from there whether and it'll ask you it'll prompt you for, like, which runtime do you wanna use, like I said, whether it be Node or Java or PHP.

writing deploy functions that, like, handles some of those things. I did a I did a a

with the functions or even with some of the other services, like the database service,

And and, like, do you see a lot of,

like, Dart and Flutter are, like, really kinda big in the AppRight community, so those would be one ways you could, battery life, like,

So, practically, like, what does that work like? So,

for free

I sure hope you're hungry.

do a lot of open source.

Awesome. Yeah. I've definitely heard of, NGRX before.

so buckle up and grab that old handle because this ride is going to get wild.

That's pretty cool. But Scott,

Oh, I'm starving.

This

you are.

So,

I also The anonymous anonymous authentication

A project called NGRX, which is a set of libraries for building reactive Angular applications, well, I don't wanna say standard setup because I guess it just depends on on what you're what you're using it for. But I got a, like, a Shure MV 7, A microphone here with the with the pop filter and all that, and, you heard you you heard of mine in the in this in the sea of other choices, so we'll take it. This episode is sponsored by Hasura, which is the instant GraphQL My my go to for this is, like, DigitalOcean because they they have a pretty,

For web and mobile flutter and flutter developers. So we'll talk about all that. It's pretty cool. It's all self hosted. I'm really excited to dig in and ask a bunch of questions.

book this one. He's like, this check god. Check out this AppRite. So,

Welcome to Syntax. We got another supper club for you today. We've got Brandon Roberts On the show to talk to us about AppRight. It's this is really cool. A secure open source back end server

Wash those hands, pull up a chair, and secure that feed bag, because it's time to listen to Scott Tolinski and Wes Bos attempt to use human language to converse with and pick the brains of other developers. I thought there was gonna be food,

is the Syntax supper club.

2nd 1 is LightStep incident response,

Tell us who you are, where you're from, and and what you do, and we'll dig into that. Yeah. So I am Brandon Roberts, of course. I work at AppRite as a developer experience engineer.

First, we're sponsored by 2 awesome companies today. 1st one is Hasura.

They do a GraphQL and REST API on a Postgres database. And

Well,

do you wanna give us, like, a a quick rundown of of what AppRite is, and then we'll dig into it a little bit more? Yeah. Sure. So, AppRight is an open source,

And that's right, which is pretty cool. So you don't you don't necessarily have to do anything custom or too custom there to add new integrations like that. And you can deploy this thing, I've done Some invest like, I've done some investments in, like, open source and,

That, one thing I heard about recently, of course, like, Bun is the new, JavaScript Rent out. Yeah. Yeah. Where's the bun examples? Somebody was asking, hey. Can we get some bun examples in here? I was like, hey. It's it's definitely possible. It just came out. Yeah. Yeah. It just came out, and we, of course, we have a with the the way the functions are set up, you can definitely, you know, add that to the run times that are available you can focused on, like, the developer experience of using AppRight. Even, you know, And a collection that you just you can give some structure to that data where you wanna, you know, name give them fields, Certain names are, We we actually do some of the some of the engineering, If if you were to to come on. But like I said, usually like I said, when I think of Flutter, I think of mobile apps. And, usually, when I think of mobile apps, my go to is usually, Ionic, UI components that you can you can use to,

LightStep instant response is built on the ServiceNow platform, which is used by over 6,000 companies.

so far, but, like, it also does authentication and users. We talked about that a little bit.

Storage. You can throw your files and your images in there. And then it has functions, which is like if you need to run some server side code, I'm assuming that that's what that's for. So It really is all the pieces that you need to run an application,

which has been pretty nice. And that that list continues to grow,

Cool. Instance of AppRight,

or Python or,

using the web SDKs, and and I guess it kinda shows, like, the flexibility of, so I can so So I can look professional. I wanna be like be like you guys. The From from what it like to me as long as you got, like, mono in the the font name, it seems like you're you're in good company. So Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

enough examples for just about any Developer to to get up and running with AppRight, of course,

which is cool also. That's amazing. This episode is sponsored today by LightStep incident response. The all in one incident response platform for DevOps and SREs. EASE.

except like, it's everything you need for the back end of of building a website. Is that Correct? Yes. That is correct. If you're if yeah. You have to bring your own you have to bring your own frien in to, the theme, pretty nice set up there. We have a actually have a marketplace app there that you can,

where you can click a few click a few checkboxes I haven't gone into the full, and, like, the AppRight console is like the the UI you see after you spin up AppRight. You can upload your functions there, but, Or learn a bunch of Docker stuff up front So that would that was what my my pick my pick was gonna be,

Like, where? It's open source. You I assuming you guys you just have a cloud function, which is probably the way that you make money.

Also, I've even got it running on Gitpod, which is which is pretty nice because Oh, wow.

or,

today, so it doesn't handle in, like, hosting or anything like that, Our deployment's,

Somebody included Dino example in the docs. We are so Yeah. Awesome.

do that all locally. So it's pretty nice. Oh, that's amazing. But, yeah, the

The other things, like you mentioned before about authentication, like, some of those are other features that are provided out of the box, and Always meant always almost always forget to mention, like, the OAuth the OAuth part of it because we have, like, Yes. That's the one I Yeah. When when I was thinking about I also I think I've used that one in some, Fetch underneath and also exposes a WebSocket. But If you if you're using those SDKs, then you don't have to hit the rest APIs directly.

And we have a link to that. We might have a link to that on our docs page, but I'm sure we'll add it in the yeah. If you go to the docs site, it'll be at the top of the page there,

you can use AppRite to to get it up and running. So, I've used it on DigitalOcean. I've got it running on, like, Amazon EC 2.

instances of it, you know, according to branches or Or PRs or things like that to not have to, So they mainly focus on Angular, React, and Vue, things that are new and interesting. So I'd I'd say those are probably my my go to these days. I I still

people on our team actually use that for development. They just use Gitpod to spin up new, Remix or, like, next Next JS work, they they have, like, routing out of the box, and, I'll take all of those as a compliment, but, I sling gifts sometime. Gifts, jifs, whatever you wanna call them,

You need these dart, to run functions with. So, but, yeah, the back end is the focus. That's cool. And the functions, what language Are they running any language you want, or is it no? So the the functions are similar to the the SDKs, and that you can run you can write Functions in

And it has a lot of microservices in AppRight. And this is something like I said, something that comes along with everything else, but Cloud functions will allow you to, or hosted on DigitalOcean.

a Docker container.

it Yeah. It packages a lot of the things that you would normally use to build an application patient will let's see. You you need, like, database access or authentication, those type of things, and it's all packaged up within,

A Docker container that exposes a a REST REST API that you can use to connect to many different services. Nice. So what kind of,