DEV Community: Ben Haynes

Co-founder of Nuxt joins Directus as its new Director of Engineering

Ben Haynes — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 13:48:12 +0000

Directus, the open source composable data platform, announced today that Alex Chopin, the co-founder of Nuxt.js, has joined the company in a strategic leadership role as their new Director of Engineering.

This move underscores Directus’ commitment to driving innovation in the open source space and strengthening its technical leadership.

"Adding Alex to our team is a move that not only enriches our technical leadership but also aligns seamlessly with our core mission of democratizing data,” said Ben Haynes, CEO and co-founder of Directus. “His open-source ethos resonates with our vision. We are extremely excited to have him continue his journey with us."

Alex, alongside his brother Sébastien, co-founded Nuxt six years ago.

What began as a side project to develop server-side rendered Vue applications, has since grown into one of the most popular frameworks in the web development space.

According to BuiltWith, Nuxt has powered close to 850,000 websites globally.

“When I started Nuxt with my brother Sébastien almost 7 years ago, I never expected to have such an incredible experience,” said Alex. "During that journey we also built NuxtLabs, a startup made of talented and passionate people with a vision of what the future web should look like.”

“But after six years as an open source company founder with all the ups and downs it brings, I decided it was time for another challenge. I am exhilarated to begin this new chapter with Directus.”

Directus, a composable data platform crafted in Typescript and Vue.js, piqued Alex’s interest with its mission to democratize the world's data, and also because of its strong roots in the open source community.

"Alex's expertise in Vue.js and his experience with community-driven projects will be instrumental in advancing our engineering objectives,” said Rijk van Zanten, co-founder and CTO at Directus.

“As a founder himself, he understands what it takes to build a product and a business into it's full potential. His innovative vision and perspective will be huge for our team as we continue to scale."

About Directus
Directus is the composable data toolkit and platform that allows developers, teams, and agencies to quickly build anything or everything. With over 26 million Docker downloads and 23,000 GitHub stars, it provides a robust toolkit and platform to turn any database into a headless data engine. Learn more at directus.io.

Real Time for Directus is Here ⚡️

Ben Haynes — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 17:39:51 +0000

This is a big day for our users and community as Directus 10.3 introduces a new way to work with your data - WebSockets.

With WebSockets, you can build real-time features into your projects backed by your Directus-managed database (btw...Directus is built with Vue 😉).

Wait, What Are WebSockets?

WebSockets are a new way to connect to Directus projects with code, and allow your applications to 'subscribe' to updates that happen to your data. Changes are pushed instantly to your users without the need for refreshing or polling.

Our implementation works by emitting events that happen in your database, so you don't have to worry about managing data persistence. What's in your Directus project is always the one-true-source of data.

What Can You Build?

What makes this even cooler is that our WebSockets implementation isn't just read-only, but also allows you to send create, update, and delete operations over the same WebSocket connection. This means that you can build things like live chats, data dashboards, and notification systems and be confident that the data you have is up-to-date.

Use GraphQL? We Got You.

If you're considering using GraphQL to handle real-time data in your application, we have the tools to help. In addition to offering a standard WebSocket interface, our platform also provides support for GraphQL Subscriptions. If this is your path, then learn how to get started with Directus GraphQL Subscriptions.

Get Started Today!

We are thrilled to see the projects you will build with this new feature, and look forward to building it out further based on community feedback. Looking for a fun small project to get started? Build a multi-user chat with full persistence backed by Directus.

How an agency creates killer sites, apps, and digital experiences with Directus + Nuxt

Ben Haynes — Mon, 05 Jun 2023 15:30:12 +0000

Erwin and Uwe are designers who got into development after being told "it wasn't possible" by those coding up their designs.

Now they create wonderfully interactive sites, apps, and digital experiences for their clients using their preferred tech stack of Directus (backend / headless CMS) and @nuxt_js (frontend).

In this episode of I Made This, they walk Bryant through one of their recent projects - a engineering job listing and talent recruitment site.

Directus 10.2 is here! 🥳 Live Preview, Improved Translations, + More

Ben Haynes — Fri, 26 May 2023 17:23:00 +0000

Heyo! 👋 Ben here, Co-founder and CEO at Directus. Dropping by to share the news that our team just dropped Directus 10.2, with one of our most requested features – Live Preview.

Introducing Live Preview

One of the most exciting new features in Directus 10.2 is Live Preview. This feature allows users to see how changes to their data will affect the look of their site from within the Directus Data Studio. Users can configure a URL pattern for each collection and preview from an item page. From the live preview, users can also test their content at various device widths.

We have added a number of guides to our docs to help you set up a website for Live Preview. This feature is a game-changer for those who want to see how their content will look before publishing it.

New Environment Variables For File Upload Safety Settings

Version 10.2 also includes new environment variables for file upload safety settings. These variables allow users to set file type and size limits, which can help prevent security issues and ensure that files are uploaded correctly.

These new environment variables are a welcome addition for users who need more control over their file uploads. They make it easy to set limits that are appropriate for their needs, without having to worry about security issues or other problems.

Bug Fixes and Optimizations

In addition to these new features and improvements, Directus 10.2 includes a number of bug fixes and optimizations. One significant bug that was fixed in this release caused self-hosted horizontally-scaled Directus instances to trigger a CRON-based Flow more than once. This was due to the fact that the various instances weren't aware of each other.

Directus now utilizes redis to synchronize schedule flows and schedule hooks between multiple instances connected to the same redis instance. This fix ensures that Directus works as expected, even when multiple instances are running.

Wrapping Up

Directus 10.2 is a significant release that brings a host of new features, improvements, bug fixes, and optimizations. The addition of Live Preview, improved translation storage, new environment variables for file upload safety settings, and bug fixes and optimizations make this release a must-have for Directus users.

Check out the full release on our GitHub repo – github.com/directus/directus/releases

Have a great weekend! 😎