the LIMITLESS pill for hackers
Limitless: with the help of a mysterious pill that enables the user to access 100 percent of his brain abilities, a struggling writer becomes a financial wizard.
This’s mainly for backend software engineers and software engineering students.
A Google Search
It’s 7 Dec 2013, a sunny Saturday morning in Bellevue, WA, US. Leonidas and Maximus are about to start working on their ambitious startup. At that point they had gained a solid software engineering experience from working with Google, Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, the United Nations, Goldman Sachs, Sony, few startups and research projects at notable universities like ETH Zurich. Maximus started working on the backend and Leonidas on the mobile client.
With hundreds of thousands of backend services developed every year with so much in common; Maximus went searching for an open source backend templates. Unfortunately he found nothing.
The Strategic Decision
Instead of writing an app-specific backend service as quickly as possible, Maximus decided to invest double the time building for the future. And split his work into app-specific-logic project and a [common] project containing the generic framework and utilities. The vision was that going forward investing in [common] will save time as more services get developed.
Fast Forward
May 2016 and many backend services (media sharing, geo services, ride sharing, …). The [common] project grew and developing new backend services became an euphoric experience. Swiftly copying and pasting code to represent a server’s api and database’s clients, followed by relatively no time to implement the service’s logic.
Open Source
At that point we decided to open source our common backend framework and utilities. To make development even faster we added code/script generators for the api code, database clients, cql scripts and wiki. It went live August 2016 on github as vangav backend.
10x
During the past year we have been battle testing it with companies and friends. Many more backend services later, vangav backend empowered software engineers to finish their work at least 10x faster. Now it’s time to let the rest of the software engineering world know about it.
Limitless vs Vangav Backend
In software engineering a system design that takes few minutes/hours to form in our brains, can take months of hard work to develop. The same happens in almost every profession (cinematography, architecture, …), because of the huge delta between our input/processing abilities (5 senses + our brains) and our output abilities (speak, write, …). What vangav backend does for software engineers is compress that time between idea and product by 90+%.
vangav backend
On GitHub: https://github.com/vangav/vos_backend
Built On Top Tech
- Cassandra: apple’s cassandra deployment has over 75,000 nodes storing over 10PB of data
- Play Framework: powers linkedin’s 500,000,000 members backend
- Akka: helps power e-shopping for hundreds of millions of amazon members
- Datastax Drivers: processes over 1,000,000,000,000 cassandra requests for netflix per day
Fully Loaded
Numerous utilities like: facebook/google auth, twilio, mail gun, rest client, rest jobs, ios/android push notifications, geo services, dispatcher/worker, periodic jobs, thread pools, facebook api, twitter’s snow flake, metrics, …
Great Templates
To make it easier, faster and more fun to use/learn vangav backend, we added templates with elevating scale
- calculate sum: a quick start service with 1 feature
- geo server: 3 features and 3 db tables, introducing simple analytics
- whatsapp: 3 services (main + worker + analytics), 7 features and 7 db tables
- instagram: 7 services (main + dispense + jobs + worker + dash board + test + bots), 47 features and 52 db tables
- …
In A Nutshell
It takes less than 5 min into the first tutorial to get the first service up and running. Check the project and tutorials on GitHub: https://github.com/vangav/vos_backend
Thank you for taking the time to read this article. Please share this project with your friends who may find it useful and support us with a star on GitHub. Happy day :))
Thanks for sharing the knowledge and for inspiring us: Y Combinator, StationF, Techstars, Stanford Business, …
