Ask HN: Looking for Feedback on Website(nitric.io)
nitric.io
Ask HN: Looking for Feedback on Website
https://nitric.io
6 comments
Just one data point: This is the first time I've ever heard of nitric, and I was unfortunately pretty confused by the website :(
"Next Generation Cloud Development" on a standard "modern SaaS" lookalike template... is it a webhost? A cloud code space like Codesandbox?
Then I read "Nitric is an open source framework with building blocks for modern apps". I thought it was some sort of UI kit, like MUI.com.
But then it said "Build for any platform with APIs, Storage, Databases, Functions, Messaging, and more", and I thought wait, maybe not, maybe something more like Vercel/Next that whitelabels a bunch of other SaaSes and combines them into a framework? So it's another JS framework...?
But I kept scrolling and the first code example is something called a "greeter" (what's that?), which returns shapes. Huh? It's a drawing lib API...? The diagram made things even less clear because it showed actual shapes flowing over the wire. Is it generating a SVG...?
But no, the next example is a database... migration...? That shows... a user being added, but returns a table? Thoroughly confused now =/ An I migrating a schema, adding a user, or querying a table?
At this point I still didn't know what the actual service was...
Then the storage example was also confusing, not showing any way to specify the cloud being used (is there a cloud?), where the image comes from (what is imageData), and what is .file... is it a filename, is it a blob of some sort that's being overwritten, what is a "profile" anyway, and why can I define its permissions at the same time I'm writing to it...? And still not clear what this service even is.
Fortunately, then I found the Github link at the top: https://github.com/nitrictech/nitric
THAT was much clearer, IMO. "Easy infrastructure from code". Aha. So it's an infrastructure orchestration system that spins up and manages cloud services from code? That instantly made sense. To me as a dev, something like "Orchestrate cloud infrastructure directly in code. Any cloud, same syntax." would be a lot clearer than "Next generation cloud development... building blocks for modern apps", which can mean anything from a web host to a UI lib to a nocode platform to an IDE, etc.
Maybe I'm just over-literal, but I honestly couldn't tell what the home page was trying to say... for a while, I actually thought it was a placeholder page for some generic SaaS example, not an actual product. Everything was too abstract that I didn't think they were real examples.
In my mind, the service is something like a Dockerfile or CI/CD pipeline or Lando.dev – something that abstracts essential services in a provider-neutral way, and in code instead of config – but I didn't get that at all until I read the Github.
I get that you're probably trying to make the home page examples super concise and simple, but without seeing a realistic workflow, it was really hard to understand what was supposed to be happening. For example, having a realistic API example that does something relatively normal (authenticate a user, or send an email, or query a DB or whatever) would be way clearer than a "greeter" that returns a "square".
I think that some before/after comparisons might help too, e.g. "here's what uploading a new file looks like in nitric, vs using the AWS/Azure/GCP SDKs directly". Like an apples-to-apples comparison of what it'd take to spin up an account, manage the permissions, provision the instances, wait for them to boot, see their status, specify the tokens, convert some binary blob, upload it, see the results, etc.
I hope that didn't sound harsh? I was trying to share my actual impression as a first-time user, which was confusion followed by eventual understanding following by "this is actually pretty cool... I hope it gets more popular/stable!"
"Next Generation Cloud Development" on a standard "modern SaaS" lookalike template... is it a webhost? A cloud code space like Codesandbox?
Then I read "Nitric is an open source framework with building blocks for modern apps". I thought it was some sort of UI kit, like MUI.com.
But then it said "Build for any platform with APIs, Storage, Databases, Functions, Messaging, and more", and I thought wait, maybe not, maybe something more like Vercel/Next that whitelabels a bunch of other SaaSes and combines them into a framework? So it's another JS framework...?
But I kept scrolling and the first code example is something called a "greeter" (what's that?), which returns shapes. Huh? It's a drawing lib API...? The diagram made things even less clear because it showed actual shapes flowing over the wire. Is it generating a SVG...?
But no, the next example is a database... migration...? That shows... a user being added, but returns a table? Thoroughly confused now =/ An I migrating a schema, adding a user, or querying a table?
At this point I still didn't know what the actual service was...
Then the storage example was also confusing, not showing any way to specify the cloud being used (is there a cloud?), where the image comes from (what is imageData), and what is .file... is it a filename, is it a blob of some sort that's being overwritten, what is a "profile" anyway, and why can I define its permissions at the same time I'm writing to it...? And still not clear what this service even is.
Fortunately, then I found the Github link at the top: https://github.com/nitrictech/nitric
THAT was much clearer, IMO. "Easy infrastructure from code". Aha. So it's an infrastructure orchestration system that spins up and manages cloud services from code? That instantly made sense. To me as a dev, something like "Orchestrate cloud infrastructure directly in code. Any cloud, same syntax." would be a lot clearer than "Next generation cloud development... building blocks for modern apps", which can mean anything from a web host to a UI lib to a nocode platform to an IDE, etc.
Maybe I'm just over-literal, but I honestly couldn't tell what the home page was trying to say... for a while, I actually thought it was a placeholder page for some generic SaaS example, not an actual product. Everything was too abstract that I didn't think they were real examples.
In my mind, the service is something like a Dockerfile or CI/CD pipeline or Lando.dev – something that abstracts essential services in a provider-neutral way, and in code instead of config – but I didn't get that at all until I read the Github.
I get that you're probably trying to make the home page examples super concise and simple, but without seeing a realistic workflow, it was really hard to understand what was supposed to be happening. For example, having a realistic API example that does something relatively normal (authenticate a user, or send an email, or query a DB or whatever) would be way clearer than a "greeter" that returns a "square".
I think that some before/after comparisons might help too, e.g. "here's what uploading a new file looks like in nitric, vs using the AWS/Azure/GCP SDKs directly". Like an apples-to-apples comparison of what it'd take to spin up an account, manage the permissions, provision the instances, wait for them to boot, see their status, specify the tokens, convert some binary blob, upload it, see the results, etc.
I hope that didn't sound harsh? I was trying to share my actual impression as a first-time user, which was confusion followed by eventual understanding following by "this is actually pretty cool... I hope it gets more popular/stable!"
FWIW, I think the previous versions of the website were clearer in some ways. For example:
Feb 2024: https://web.archive.org/web/20240226140616/https://nitric.io... the "Effortless infrastructure" section is especially helpful, because it's clear about what this is and mentions common keywords like Terraform or IaC, which the new home page completely ignores.
Nov 2022: https://web.archive.org/web/20221104194156/https://nitric.io... The 1-2-3 steps there with a realistic example and text descriptions made a lot more sense than the flowchart currently on the home page (which is both too complex and too small to comfortably read; I can't really see what it's doing).
Feb 2024: https://web.archive.org/web/20240226140616/https://nitric.io... the "Effortless infrastructure" section is especially helpful, because it's clear about what this is and mentions common keywords like Terraform or IaC, which the new home page completely ignores.
Nov 2022: https://web.archive.org/web/20221104194156/https://nitric.io... The 1-2-3 steps there with a realistic example and text descriptions made a lot more sense than the flowchart currently on the home page (which is both too complex and too small to comfortably read; I can't really see what it's doing).
Thanks! That's not harsh at all, it's exactly what Tim and I are looking for. It's honest detailed feedback with great reasoning. I appreciate you taking the time to provide so much detail.
Trying to fix issues we've had where the purpose of the project is misinterpreted, and trying to see if there are any gaps that can be addressed etc.
Thanks in advance for any feedback/comments :)