looks cool on several levels: empowering people to build the things they want w/o being "1337", volunteer driven, a "noBackend"/"One Backend Per User" (http://www.infoq.com/presentations/private-backend) default for a freer internet, and named after one of the most versatile articles of clothing ever invented.
the hoodie-server repo clocks in at just under 3k lines of javascript, though. i mean, there are a bunch of plugins, and wc is far from the best metric, but it's the only one that i've time for while this is still near the top of the list, so i'll just ask:
is this whole project to be viewed more as kick-ass-but-still-in-progress codebase or more like a socio-political statement about what happens when you make creating a single user's experience the priority (vs. trying to roll out an app that could scale your user base while still managing to own all their data)?
You basically nailed it :) — Hoodie is probably further along that it might seem. The team has been working on earlier iterations of this for nearly a decade now, and we have learned a lot along the way, allowing us to be very concise this time around. In addition, we have chosen a few powerful abstractions to make the actual implementation rather tiny.
That said, there is lots of work to be done, to make it, say, Rails, or Django-grade production ready, but the rough sketches are there and we are comfortable running a production app since December 2013, and we are working with a bunch of clients on their products, that we are comfortable with putting our reputation on the line for.
After 1.0 (we are pre), we want to be very explicit with the different levels of stability and maturity we ascribe to all parts of the system and the whole release overall. Our current production app handles 10k registered users on a small VPS without much sweat, so anywhere in that order of magnitude, with similar usage patterns, we thing Hoodie rocks the real-world, but if you are significantly diverging from this, we want to be careful and only recommend other’s to rely on Hoodie, when we have reasonable first or second hand experience of similar scale and use.
As for the socio-political statement: that’s definitely a big part of our motivation. We want to write and spread a story that isn’t the usual idea-vc-flip-sunset / abuse-overworking-cheating horror stories. And freeing data and empowering users is a future we want to see, so we are building it :)
the hoodie-server repo clocks in at just under 3k lines of javascript, though. i mean, there are a bunch of plugins, and wc is far from the best metric, but it's the only one that i've time for while this is still near the top of the list, so i'll just ask:
is this whole project to be viewed more as kick-ass-but-still-in-progress codebase or more like a socio-political statement about what happens when you make creating a single user's experience the priority (vs. trying to roll out an app that could scale your user base while still managing to own all their data)?
anyway, it seems like some of each.