What does HackerNews think of mathesar?
Web application providing an intuitive user experience to databases.
Otherwise, I just use the command line.
I'm philosophically opposed to open core (Mathesar is run out of a non-profit), but I can see why other projects do it – finding funding for a big project like this is difficult without VCs (who expect returns).
I do think that people new to Svelte find it hard. It takes a while to understand how the `$` reactive statements work, and when and when-not to use it. When I first started working with Svelte, I tried to do things the React way and shared similar frustrations. Now that I've been working with Svelte for smaller and bigger projects for nearly 5 years (yes, since 2.0), I find Svelte's reactive pattern simple and intuitive.
There are some aspects I find frustrating with Svelte. One example is being able to pass templates around. With React I'd just pass JSX, but since Svelte is statically compiled, I've had to create components for such scenarios. Slots don't cover all usecases. I can live with this though.
I have built a couple large projects using Svelte and haven't faced issues with scaling. I found Svelte to be quite flexible, which has enabled me to build fast, and maintain a performant codebase.
My recent project is Mathesar, which has a large frontend codebase in Svelte + Typescript [1]. It's also open-source so you can check out the codebase. We use pretty much all of Svelte's features and we even implemented a full component library. Here's an old discussion for deciding which frontend library to use for Mathesar, where we selected Svelte [2].
We have had to establish a number of patterns (including around reactivity) so that new contributors don't break things, which happens more often than you think.
Svelte's primary issue is a lack of established patterns, which makes it easy for new Svelte developers to get things wrong. React has a number of such patterns due to it's massive community. I believe as Svelte's community keeps growing and more projects choosing Svelte, this would be tackled.
[1]: https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar [2]: https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar/discussions/55
Also, relationships without foreign keys is on our roadmap: https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar/discussions/2276
My last two jobs have been maintaining open source software at nonprofits[1], which is great. Regardless, I would open source anything I write that I think would be useful for other people.
[1] My current project is https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar
I'm glad there are more tools to make working with data easier, but I don't use any of them because putting my data into a proprietary service I have to keep paying for is a dealbreaker.
Mathesar is an open source tool that provides an intuitive interface to databases. Our goal is to make it easy for non-technical users to create, organize, and analyze data collaboratively, without any prior knowledge of database concepts. We started prototyping the project in March 2021 and are working towards our first (alpha) release in mid-2022. Our frontend stack is Svelte & TypeScript, our backend stack is PostgreSQL, Django, and SQLAlchemy.
You'll join our small, globally distributed team as our third frontend engineer. You'll be working at the Center of Complex Interventions (CCI), a U.S. nonprofit. We work asynchronously and value work/life balance. Our work is public:
* Look through our code: https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar
* Read our project and team wiki: https://wiki.mathesar.org/en/home
* Join our communication channels: https://wiki.mathesar.org/en/community
For the full job description and application instructions, see https://wiki.mathesar.org/en/jobs
Github link: https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar
We are in the very early stages and are looking for opinions on choosing the frontend framework/library. It would be great if you could help us out on this.
The discussion thread on Github is here: https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar/discussions/55 and we can also discuss on HN. Thanks.