nsypteras

Nice! I really love the simplicity of Spotless! Thanks for sharing and definitely reach out if you'd ever like to chat more about this space or any general feedback - nick@napkin.io

If you're familiar with webhooks, you can code and deploy them easily with Napkin by just writing code in the editor and clicking "Deploy". With other tools, you usually have to install dependencies on the command line or set up more complex cloud services to do this. You can see an example of the webhook use case with this Slack bot example: https://napkin.wiki/slack

For a static website, there's a lot of great options that don't require a "backend" per se. Vercel and Netlify are great if you use React and/or Next.js. For a no-code solution you can check out Webflow. If you want to just serve static HTML/CSS/Javascript pages, my preference is to do that with just AWS S3 (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/Hostin...).

Congrats on learning to code! If you ever want to chat about backend stuff feel free to reach out to nick@napkin.io :)

Thanks for sharing the stack trace. If you could share your username here or with nick@napkin.io I will dig deeper to see what's going on there. Pandas never fails to both assist and haunt me :)

Would love to! Please reach out to nick@napkin.io and let's do it!

Thanks for comment, so glad to hear that! We are planning to over team collab features later this summer!

Totally valid concern. We plan to add Github integration soon which will also enable local development, code reviews, etc!

Thanks for reporting that! I just tried myself and seems to have worked. If you have any repro steps or other bug reports please do let us know anytime on twitter or at support@napkin.io . Thanks!!

Right now the goal is similar to that of cloud9 - provide an in-browser dev environment for quickly building apps; however, Napkin focuses on the serverless backend function and prototyping use cases. We want to streamline the UI to make writing and deploying Python and JS functions as quick as possible with 0 configuration. In the near future we will be adding some sharing/forking capabilities that we think will enhance this even further!

The sandbox editor (napkin.io/sandbox) deploys as you type, but when you are signed in, changes are only deployed once you click "Deploy".

Essentially yes. It's an in browser editor that deploys your code as a public API endpoint as you type. It has the functionality of Lambda + API Gateway + Cloudwatch Logs with a lot of other utilities built in to expedite building small serverless functions

Unit testing - no unit testing yet but you can test out mock request data by using the Run Options tab in the Napkin editor. Organization - folders and workspaces coming soon, but if you have any other ideas for this we'd love to hear it! Right now you are restricted to single "file" per endpoint. In the future we plan to enable Napkin functions to reference each other which we hope will mitigate some of this limitation. Local development is not currently an option; however, we plan to add Github integration some time this year, which would enable this. How we prioritize it will depend on how many users ask for it.

Thanks so much for the questions!

Thanks a lot! Yes currently those things definitely are beneficial and necessary at production scale; however, we're hoping we can chip away bit by bit at the need to configure these things yourself, starting with basic server(less) configuration.

No boilerplate currently, we plan on adding a lot of examples to the site going forward. For now yes you would install any packages you need as you normally would from the "Modules" tab in the editor. More docs here as well: https://napkin.wiki/docs/javascript

Thanks for the comment! Yes you can use any NPM or Python package capable of doing that in Napkin. One limitation right now is that you cannot send back file data in responses, so you would have to upload to some external store like s3 and then return a url.

My co-founder and I built https://napkin.io for this reason. We thought the experience of onboarding and stitching together services with AWS was too complex. With Napkin you can deploy a Python API endpoint from our landing page with a single button click.

We're actively developing this so any feedback of how we could make this better for your use case is welcome!

We plan to add data storage in the full release very soon! Currently you'd have to integrate with another cloud data store like Firebase. Appreciate the question and feedback!

Thanks xprillon :) Github integration is coming very soon, stay tuned!

Super happy that Napkin's useful for you :) Please feel free to reach out with any more feedback or questions here or at nick@napkin.io

Hi, HN! I'm Nick and my co-founder, Thomas, and I are building napkin.io to make backend development easier. Napkin is a website that lets you code and instantly deploy endpoints from your browser. We feel building a backend is overly difficult and requires too much boilerplate. Our goal with Napkin is to allow anyone that knows a little Python to instantly code and deploy a scalable backend server, whether that be a Slack bot, an endpoint for a mobile app, or an Alexa integration. No infra or boilerplate needed.

Today we're launching the beta, and we plan on adding a lot more functionality based on user feedback over the coming weeks. Would really appreciate any and all feedback. Thanks!

"They actually have more say than you think" - I disagree. China forcibly relocated over 1 million to complete the 3 gorges project. It doesn't have the best track record of reacting to citizen concerns. I think the other points you mention are more material in it's nuclear considerations.

Fair about the money and pollution. I would assume those commercial advances you mention however are mostly non-military, nor will players like Google or Apple likely soon contribute to US government/military AI research initiatives. I guess in the end the "AI race" is more like "AI olympics" in that no country will win all the events

"Citizens are extremely wary of the government to do it right." - I don't think citizens have much say in the matter...

- it's worth noting that along with data and talent, there is money - China's dedicated 150 billion USD to AI as part of it's 5 year plan. Meanwhile the US is considering cutting scientific research funding by as much as 15% as part of 2018 budget

Thanks a lot for the tweet! I'll give that lambda link a read, would definitely like to learn more. Thanks again :)