Stoic - Turn spreadsheet into mobile apps

I went to Stoic meetup in Singapore and learnt quite a lot from this amazing product.

Their concept of turning spreadsheet data into usable "apps" seems neat. Everyone wish to turn  rows and columns of data into something more meaningful. Stoic aims to do that.

my sketch of their product

Stoic generalise the data, and then let you view them from different perspectives. You can then easily integrate their map/grid/etc widgets into your website.

For example, they built a Q&A app using their Stoic platform! All with just 300 lines of code.

But that wasn't all.

I was most amaze at their approach and technology.

Firstly, they like JavaScript a lot. They use great frameworks - node, angular and stuff. Then when there isn't a library that they need, they engineered it! Hence they released formula.js, parseq.js and jsDoc.

And they are never shy to talk about their culture and the tools they use.

When an audience asked about they funding and if they would still be around in the future, this was what Ismael (roughly) said:

We are not worried. We are in our mid-40s. We have wife, kids and mortgage, but we are financially very stable. We can go on for years without earning revenues. No problem.

That's some attitude.

Developer Outreach and their Benefits

While reading some whitepaper from ChallengePost on "how to organise developer contest", I came across this matrix on the various developer program components and their benefits.

For example, your developer portal and blog is mainly for reaching out to your existing developers, less on reaching out to new developers. 

Developer Video Channels

Google has it's Developer Live video channel.

Now, Facebook has launched it's own. Head over to Facebook's Developer Live and grab some love.

An App for Hosting Hackathons

If you are organizing an hackathon, you could use hackathon.io to create and manage the event.

It covers common activities such as:

• Invite participants
• Invite sponsors
• Invite judge
• Create schedule
• Write rules
• Feed for event
• Judging tools (vote)

APIhub: World's largest repository?

APIhub is like a new ProgrammableWeb.

It claims to have the largest repository (it claims 13,000 APIs).

Put Your Sample Code in Github

Sample code is one of the elements needed from an API provider.

More and more, the trend is to put your open source sample code on Github. Today, even Google has moved theirs, starting with 36 repos, to Github.

Is Google ditching code.google.com & svn/hg?

Github is dominating on public repos, as it is free for anyone to create unlimited public repos. More developers, more social coding, and more eyeball on your code.

Facebook Promise to Give Developers 90 days For Major API Changes

Facebook API has been largely criticised for frequently making breaking changes.

As such, they have introduced their 90-days policy.

We are committed to a 90-day breaking change policy. This means Platform changes that would require a code change from developers (security and privacy changes excluded) will be announced at least 90 days before the change goes into effect.

To clarify, there are 4 points to take note of:

1. Major change/removal of functionality: You have 90 days to comply
2. Backwards compatible change: Your code should be versatile to new parameters in request/response
3. Product Change: You will be inform ed.
4. Privacy/Security Changes: Fix like these will be immediate, even if it is breaking change