I'm at Fog Creek, and we're introducing Gomix
I love Gomix. I spent the past weekend helping a friend migrate a static front-end only CSS skin they had made over to a live server on Gomix. That friend has moved onto running webpack and babel locally to do more advanced stuff, but Gomix was a godsend in helping demonstrate to him that the problemspace isn&#x27;t as horrifyingly large as he expected. We communicated and &quot;code reviewed&quot; via writing comments to each other in js files. It was a really pleasant experience.<p>I loved it when it was called Hyperdev too. At first I didn&#x27;t really get it (I work at Stack Overflow so we&#x27;re part of the same extended family meaning my first impression of Hyperdev was before it was as polished), honestly at first I was angry they were even spending the time doing something I considered so stupid. Until I had a use for it.<p>I had gotten a Raspberry Pi foundation touch-screen LCD, spent my Saturday morning setting it up, had a grandiose idea of what I wanted to make using it (basically just a &quot;smart&quot; note &#x2F; TODO &#x2F; grocery list manager I could attach to my fridge&#x27;s door) and... realized I had to write yet-another-webapp. I&#x27;ve been making web apps for around a dozen years. The last thing I want to do in my life is spend the time writing the basics of a web-app.<p>My idea was going to be a thing where I&#x27;d use Trello (wow this is becoming an ad for all my sister companies remind me to plug FogBugz, Kiln, and CityDesk at some point too) as the &quot;data store&quot;. I have Trello boards for everything. Work to-dos, Personal to-dos, even a trello list for the records I own and the records I want to own.<p>After writing the basics of what I wanted down, I started sketching the UI. And you know what? After I had all that set, I was able to make a prototype of the entire thing in less than 15 minutes using Gomix (at the time Hyperdev). You can view my prototype here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;coal-sting.gomix.me&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;coal-sting.gomix.me&#x2F;</a><p>I didn&#x27;t end up building the full flow, but I&#x27;ve been coming back to the Gomix project every month or two and adding one-more-MVP-checklist-feature to my prototype. And once I&#x27;m done with it? I can take all the JS I wrote, put it into a project bundled with webpack like the rest of my projects, and place it directly onto my RPi and touchscreen.<p>I know Gomix looks deceptively simple, but that&#x27;s exactly why I love it. I <i>really</i> value minimizing the time it takes to go from &quot;ooh that&#x27;s a cool idea&quot; to &quot;holy shit I&#x27;m actually working on the idea and not the cruft and skeleton code I need to work on before I get to work on the idea itself!&quot;<p>Half the time the reason why I stop working on a side project is because I&#x27;m getting bored before I get to even work on the real side project. I am always just looking for an excuse to give up and go back to playing video games.<p>Gomix is perfect for me. I can&#x27;t wait until they support more languages so I can throw away all the time I&#x27;ve spent and code I&#x27;ve written making templates[0] and bootstrappers[1] for myself.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jc4p&#x2F;flask-react-skeleton" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jc4p&#x2F;flask-react-skeleton</a>
[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jc4p&#x2F;quickstart" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jc4p&#x2F;quickstart</a>