As a dev, completely get the need. Yes, most of my day-to-day job is making a small change or reproducing a bug locally, testing, and then deploying. Setting up that loop has been harder than I want to admit and is the reason I know maven, ant, chef AND puppet, Jenkins, and gradle as well as I do. In many ways I wish I didn't have to!
That said, my friendly advice would be to pick one framework and environment combination and solve this problem end to end. Node would be a perfect start. Show me how to use your project to make node dev shorter and easier. If I believe you I will use you and node for new projects. I'm not going to switch an existing project to jumpstart because I've already set up the flow. Maybe I'm weird, but I demand single-command builds and deploys. All my projects already have it. But I'm willing to learn new techs to avoid the pain.
I see your landing page and take away you have lofty goals and are trying to be all things to all people. Don't. Pick one. Focus. Be the best at it. Make a YouTube video that shows me how you get 1-second whatever. It's especially puzzling when you don't have a demo video but you have a produced ad on "flow." It's hard to believe your product has substance during this launch.
I'm willing to switch to angular and node (or hipster.js and kitkat.io -- whatever, it doesn't really matter) to get what you advertise. For new projects. I won't touch existing stuff. It means I have to test and am likely to break something by moving to your project in prod. Nobody ever changes their build scripts!
I totally agree. That's why the team has focused on PHP and PHP frameworks mostly for now. Getting the scripts as right as possible over the months.
And we've been using respected members of the other language communities to build up the stacks.
I know for someone like me I want one hosting account for everything if I can. I hate multiple accounts and it's nice to just see everything in one place.
Totally get the strategy, though I was writing PHP apps 10 years ago... I would be hard pressed to go back, especially after having touched YII last year. PHP is legacy today, right or wrong.
My point is twofold: First, it's very important to nail a trending language and framework. Right now that is a short list of Go, pure-JavaScript (firebase + angular), node, and maybe django. You are going after mindshare of hackers. You have to pick the trendy environments. The whole reason people left PHP to rails was the YouTube video where the guy typed "rails server" and magically stuff just worked. You need to do the same for the short list above.
Second, you have to show the benefit of your product. Seeing is believing. Nothing else will substitute.
While this is the anonymous Internet and you know nothing about me, at least do some gut checks with the current uni kids. Best of luck!
It is somewhat legacy, and I personally don't use a ton of it. But the designer world loves it - new frameworks are constantly still coming out on PHP.
I stopped using PHP so much for that very video. It's very like DHH's video, that's what we're aiming to do.
+1 on creating a developer centric intro video. Having tried your product, I know that a video like that would get serious traction on a place like HN.
That said, my friendly advice would be to pick one framework and environment combination and solve this problem end to end. Node would be a perfect start. Show me how to use your project to make node dev shorter and easier. If I believe you I will use you and node for new projects. I'm not going to switch an existing project to jumpstart because I've already set up the flow. Maybe I'm weird, but I demand single-command builds and deploys. All my projects already have it. But I'm willing to learn new techs to avoid the pain.
I see your landing page and take away you have lofty goals and are trying to be all things to all people. Don't. Pick one. Focus. Be the best at it. Make a YouTube video that shows me how you get 1-second whatever. It's especially puzzling when you don't have a demo video but you have a produced ad on "flow." It's hard to believe your product has substance during this launch.
I'm willing to switch to angular and node (or hipster.js and kitkat.io -- whatever, it doesn't really matter) to get what you advertise. For new projects. I won't touch existing stuff. It means I have to test and am likely to break something by moving to your project in prod. Nobody ever changes their build scripts!