Adam Crockett 🌀

Posted on Oct 15, 2020 • Edited on Oct 18, 2020

Anyone looking for a new side-gig? - Developers assemble!

#webdev #svelte #kotlin #typescript

Before we start, I am a regular blogger here, not fishing. 🤖
Instructions to join at the end of the post.

I have an idea and I wonder if anyone wanted to work on something related to the e-commerce space, Initially it will be a cool project for your resume and if it takes off, we can talk about partnering and starting up.

The backstory

My partner was chatting with me in the kitchen the other night, as we know the best ideas come from the kitchen! She told me about how she wants to setup a shop. She said, what about the made to order strategy.
Normally I think that made to order is for the realms of etsy, It doesn't scale... but hang on why doesn't it scale in the age of scale?
I know why and I'd love to tell you more!

But let's get my credentials out of the way first.
Why work with me? I love great technology, I love to learn and build cool things but that is not enough.
I worked on Dyson's global public facing websites internally for a couple of years and In that time, I found out what was a pain in the ass to build and maintain. One aspect which I cant reveal here. This one thing, it can be turned into a service.

Roughly what are we creating:

A scaleable, marketable service
Enhancing a portion of a typical e-commerce journey and allowing for integration and theming
A way to make your shopping experience more immersive and engaging
Bringing a new experience to shoppers worldwide

Questions and Veige answers

Does this thing exist already in the wild?

Yes and no. No this is not a Shopify clone, it is out of scope for them. It's something that does already exist that some companies do make for their websites but its usually quite low on the priority list and tends to never work amazingly, or its outsourced to an agency, or its full of bugs and takes up a lot of time, its also a really cool and creative thing to build and can be wrapped up into a templated form and sold.

Will it be open source?

I strongly believe in free software for those who cannot spare the expense, so for small business yes this will be free to use. And yes there will be an aspect of open source to some degree, but to core engine will remain closed.

Your skills will shape this

If you like the sound of any of the following, reach out an we can start something, even if it's a couple of hours a week (what Im doing).

3D and Web game development
Kotlin / Rust web development
Typescript / JavaScript
State Machines and Actors
Dashboards
UX and UI Design
Accesible web
Internationalisation
Integrations design
Serverless

Sweet thanks for hearing me out. 👋

How to join

Follow me on GH and drop me a message here that you want to join.

Update: 🥳 looks like we are using svelte! A new experience for me, excited to learn something new!

Top comments (25)

Adam Crockett 🌀 • Oct 16 '20

If anyone is bookmaking because if interest? please instead, leave a comment, I can't see who bookmarked. 🔖

Moshe Uminer • Oct 16 '20

I like the sound of all of it 😀, but I think the only one I am proficient is JS/TS. Though I am currently experimenting with both rust and kotlin 🙂.

Adam Crockett 🌀 • Oct 16 '20

Sometimes a limitation is a blessing, Mine is self imposed, I was a full stack developer now I am a Frontend UI engineer at work. so I'm just more focused on one thing over another which is absolutely fine.

As for Rust and Kotlin or whatever it ends up being. Im not sure which we will choose, or how many people will join this project. If it turns into 4+ I will have to create a discord server or something.
Il post the repo if you would like to join, there are a lot of issues being created to make decisions before a single line of code is put together.

Moshe Uminer • Oct 16 '20

Sounds good. But I must warn you that it may turn out that I don't have enough time to contribute. 😕

Adam Crockett 🌀 • Oct 16 '20

There is no expectations, if you fancy working on anything at any point over the next year then that's all good. I'm asking a lot of people already.

Adam Crockett 🌀 • Oct 16 '20

Even contributors for discussions on issues and code reviews is invaluable.

Adam Crockett 🌀 • Oct 16 '20

github.com/adam-cyclones/cass

Its private so I guess if you cant request to join, just follow me on GH and I will add you.

Moshe Uminer • Oct 16 '20

I followed you, as I can't see a way request access. Github just pretends the repo doesn't exist 🙂.

Adam Crockett 🌀 • Oct 16 '20

Welcome to the repo, its not much but its a start :D

JkImExploring • Oct 19 '20 • Edited

Hi I'd be interested in joining. I'm a self-taught developer and only know JS but I have plenty of time and will to dedicate to learning different technology.

Adam Crockett 🌀 • Oct 19 '20

Hey Jenna, thanks for the interest, I will add you to the repository. It's still early days and no code committed, lots of planning going on though.

JkImExploring • Oct 20 '20

Thank you! I'm looking forward to pitching in!

Adam Crockett 🌀 • Oct 20 '20

I hope the invite still works, we renamed the repo last night to Configuregator

Adam Crockett 🌀 • Oct 19 '20

Invite sent to your github, thanks for taking part!

Scott Simontis • Nov 12 '20

I am late to the party it looks like, but serverless and TS are my biggest areas of expertise and I would love to learn Rust web dev. I have a lot of experience with content management systems, integrations, and analytics as well, plus DevOps automation tasks give me a great sense of well-being.

Adam Crockett 🌀 • Nov 12 '20

Okay well heres where we are:
Frontend

We have a full set of high fidelity designs showing what we are building plus some open issues discussing what direction to take.
All decisions where made in balanced discussions
Everything is going to use typescript where possible
We use Svelte - because its able to compile to web components and its easy to understand and write
xState controls all logic, no logic is left to Svelte, Svelte just consumes and renders

Backend

Yet to push, I have been hard at work making a development environment inside a container that you will be able to just clone install and develop.
We choose GraalVM so that we could use any backend language we wanted to write micro-services, the API is in kotlin, but because Graal runs Rust among a host of other languages out of the box all of which perform faster than they would normally even Ruby.
We have a full access manager which I am skinning and blending into the main application, due to the nature of what we are building, it is highly likely new customer experiences for products not yet released will be in a pre-published state, we don't want any leeks.
In a sense we are building a vertical slice of CMS for a very specific task
In the first draft we don't have any headless or cloud stuff, but we are absolutely heading that way.

I will add you to the repository, see what you think, please not that a good 90% of the stack is stuff thats new to all of us and we all just want to learn, there is no obligation to work to schedule, we are working at a slow and steady pace.