Hi HN,<p>I built Codeblox to allow developers to connect code together like building blocks. This makes it easy to build sequences (series of blocks) to do all kinds of things.<p>Every block and sequence gets an API endpoint (POST api.codeblox.io/username/blockName) and you can also schedule them to run daily.<p>Each code block specifies an input and output type (text, number, location, etc) and you can build sequences by combining blocks that fit together.<p>How it Works:<p>- CLI tool packages up your directory as a ZIP file, and uploads it to S3
- That filename is stored in the DB
- When someone invokes your code from the website, the back-end (Node.js) creates a Lambda function pointed to your ZIP in S3, invokes it and returns the result
- For sequences, do the same thing, except the client handles making each sequential call<p>Stack:
FE: React/Redux
BE: Node.js, MySQL, AWS, Redis<p>I'd be really interested to hear any feedback or feature requests.<p>I'm also looking for a co-founder to work on this with (NYC or SF area), so if you like the idea just reach out at info [at] codeblox [dot] io<p>Thanks!
Alan
Now a question: have you thought about just running code blocks on the client? It would have limitations, but I guess most tasks could be accomplished, and the backend running costs would be enormously smaller.<p>There's also the problem of executing other people's code in your visitors machines, but maybe that isn't so bad -- or could be solved by running a better language than raw Javascript.<p>I know this sounds like a silly idea, but what do you think?
Ok, just one more quibble: I have the impression that since blocks are small this system is ideal for small pieces of code and has already a great a web interface for input/output, why not let us edit blocks online and test them live with hand-inputted values while we edit? Glitch.com, for example, has a web editor by default, but it is so cumbersome to try the app while editing it -- the contrary is true on Codeblox.
This is a nice concept. It seems like making coding more social and I am excited to see people making interesting things with collaboration.<p>Right now we can assemble blocks sequentially. It would be awesome if those can also be arranged conditionally (by some programming language- a programming language to arrange blocks of code,eh).
I think this would be very useful for non-coders. For example, some days ago a friend of mine was struggling to get just the emails addresses from a list of names+emails he had in an Excel file.