[jressey]

This is a serious question: Do any of you folks get paid good money to start projects? In my career I have "started" projects for maybe 2-5% of my time. All of the real effort goes in to massaging the app to actually solve unique business problems, about 80-90% on edge cases.

Bold and cynical claim: Making and selling apps like this is akin to building a social media brand about building social media brands. The problem this solves is only experienced by serial creators who like starting projects, not making useful stuff. I personally know 2 people who are like that attempted to start this exact same concept for a company, and that was like 6 years ago, and it was Rails too.

[vladcodes]

> Making and selling apps like this is akin to building a social media brand about building social media brands

So much this.

I really can't understand all the excitement above, unless you're starting a new proof of concept daily (but then, the price looks ridiculous) and you're ready for the "buy now - pay later" way of development. If "move fast break things" is still the thing in 2022, then it makes more sense to just draft an MVP in html/js with something like Firestore as a backend?

[adrianthedev]

"draft an MVP in html/js with something like Firestore as a backend"... so much here. It sounds easy, but is it? I remember the days when I would get stuck on a webpacker config issue instead of working on the real meat of my app.

I speak weekly with developers that tell me "oh, you made an admin panel. I could build that in a few hours. we don't need it." and they never do. They really can't. It's a tough thing to make something quick, reliable, and that gives you no headaches in the short and long run.

And, I guess the excitement is not just for building MVPs, but in general for how much things have evolved and that we have alternatives to copy and pasting forms and fields around.

I'm not going to say that everyone should use Avo. I believe that each developer vibes with some technologies. That's why we use ruby, PHP, JS, VSCode, vim, chrome, firefox, linux or macs. Because we understand them, think in that way, and push out great work with them. So yeah, if Firestore is your thing you should use it. I'm not pointing any fingers.

[vladcodes]

> "oh, you made an admin panel. I could build that in a few hours. we don't need it." and they never do.

I was never saying making anything with any technology is easy.

Developing with plain Rails and a minimum of gems is linearly difficult while developing with a set of DSL/generators like Avo can lead to a complexity spike from 1 to 11 in no time. And the worst thing — at a random stage of development.

From the business perspective of view, I really like it: it's a perfect example of a micro-project and I wish you the most of luck.

[pelagicAustral]

I wholeheartedly agree with this post. I have used/tried every admin panel creator gem under the sun. Or other 'quickstart' products out there such as Jumpstart. Other than that there has been several efforts to make admin panels for rapid app creation that come with some CSS flavor. And always end up hitting the same ceiling, that one feature that cannot be created due to DLS limitations or whatever, and then its all back to square one just that now you have to hack the shit out of the app to make things work.

Never going down the road of using tools like OP's one, I rather spend more time writing boilerplate, which in the end is what's saving here.

It does look like a nicely crafted project and I wish OP luck with it.

[adrianthedev]

I believe that no tool is perfect. Not even Rails. We reach for other gems and sometimes do things not "the Rails way" and we get the job done.

And there's a fallacy there. We don't go saying "Rails doesn't do everything I need it to do, so I'd rather spend more time to write my framework from scratch". But we're (and I'm including myself too) very quick to say things like that about certain tools just because "it's never been done before", "Nobody uses an off-the-shelf package to build their app on", "I'll hit a ceiling with it...", and so on.

Yes, Avo isn't perfect, and yes, Avo isn't right for any kind of project. There are some that are more suited and some that aren't. Sometimes you might hit a "ceiling" with Avo, but I baked in a ton of "escape hatches" (add own content on multiple levels, override views, override controllers, multiple ways of interacting with the data, Stimulus JS). Using these "escape hatches" (I gotta stop using that term), will help you get the job done.

This message is not fingepointing towards you or anyone else, and I respect everyone's way of doing things, but we should take some time and reflect on that. We don't go and build linuxes, nginxes, pumas, railses and other pieces of tooling everytime beacause we might get stuck at one point. We make it work. Same should apply with pieces of software like Avo.

Thank you for the message!

[adrianthedev]

> "Developing with plain Rails and a minimum of gems is linearly difficult while developing with a set of DSL/generators like Avo can lead to a complexity spike from 1 to 11 in no time. And the worst thing — at a random stage of development"

I agree 100% with your statement! Really!

Thank you!

[adrianthedev]

A very pertinent question. If you're asking if Avo "pays the bills", it doesn't. I hope it will some day. Damn, I hope I earn money in some other way and donate Avo to Ruby central, becomes free so it becomes the default way of building Rails apps.

Until that time, I am pretty stocked that other developers want (and pay) to use something I've created.

Yeah, it takes a lot to build the messaging around a product. This current message "Build apps 10x faster" is probably the 10th or 20th iteration. I had to speak with a lot of users and try to figure out how it helps them in their daily dev life.

Building the product is the easy thing (for a developer), doing the marketing, steering it into the right direction, figuring out what the best features are, sales, funnels, etc. Those are the difficult things. They are difficult for me because I don't have a following.

Regarding your "Bold and cynical claim", I respect your opinion. I wouldn't go to say that everyone just want to build a following and launch useless product to achieve that.

[jressey]

I respect your hustle and understanding of what makes a successful product. I'm making no comment on that.

I was in general asking the community about how often they get paid to start apps vs. continue them.

[adrianthedev]

Oh, I see what you mean. What kind of "gigs" they get. "Starters" or "continuers" (maintenance).

Gotcha! Personally I started a lot of projects. Probably more than 50%. And the money were good, but not as good as doing maintenance for a big company with a big product.

[pmontra]

I've been working on four projects in the last 12 months. I helped starting one of them in 2017 (Elixir / Phoenix.) I inherited a RoR one in 2012 and two Django ones in 2016 and 2019.

Given the long life of projects that make money one doesn't start many of them but being able to show something in a short time is important. It helps to focus on features and not to get lost in architectural yak shaving.

[adrianthedev]

Yak shaving. It's "my mission in life" to avoid that. I like pushing things out fast and early.

"Listen to your customers and push out the features they need, not the features you think they need."

[PhilipDaineko]

> Do any of you folks get paid good money to start projects?

I would argue with this thesis. There is a whole market of templates: themeforest, wrapbootstrap, template monster, creative-tim, flatlogic (my company) and others.

Templates are solely used to start the project, so I would say that the market is large