10 Years of Meteor

Let me tell you about my crazy experience with Meteor.<p>The year: 2015. I had just graduated from Dev Bootcamp in NYC and was desperately searching for my first engineering job. I came across a job posting on Craigslist for a startup that sounded promising. It was one of the few interviews I could even get. They told me next to nothing about the job, and literally nothing about the product, except that it would be built with Meteor.<p>The whole interview process was the weirdest I’ve ever been in. The two founders brought in four candidates (myself included) into a single conference room and told us they were going to hire two of us. They then went on and on for an hour telling us about how successful and genius they were, and that they were going to be building something 10 times more successful than Facebook. The whole interview was essentially a lightning round of JS trivia questions (type coercion edge cases and such). First to answer correctly got a point and so on.<p>Naive me, I remember building out a whole Meteor project trying to impress them. They took about three weeks to tell me that I had gotten the job and they were ready to tell me what the product was, I just had to sign an NDA, get it notarized, and hand deliver it to them.<p>Before I could deliver the NDA to them, they told me the terms of my offer—$13&#x2F;hr at 20 hours per week. No benefits or equity, obviously. BUT, I would get 1% of any profits.<p>Making minimum wage in NYC with no potential for upside gain was not in the cards for me, but it did drive me to learn about Meteor—a technology I wasted about two months with before abandoning because no one in their right mind was using it.

Ah, the memories of meteor.<p>Feeling like a rockstar while developing. Impressing the colleagues and clients with how amazing functionality I could produce in so little time.<p>Then the absolute horror of production traffic hitting the system and everything grinding to a halt. If I remember correctly, the resources required by their reactive data model scaled up significantly both with read connection count and write activity. And I could not do a damn thing about it without a complete rewrite. First and only real case in my career where I simply could not solve the problem, not even a small part of the problem.<p>Oh, and it also let me experience running Mongo as primary data source. A lot of experience gained courtesy of meteor.js, for sure, but I&#x27;d prefer it to stay in rear view mirror for sure.

100% agree with this post. I also co-authored a book about Meteor[1] and, to me, it&#x27;s really the &quot;framework that got away.&quot; Modern React&#x2F;Redux&#x2F;JSX&#x2F;Next&#x2F;etc. completely sucks compared to how awesome and seamless Meteor felt when it first came out. Surprised you didn&#x27;t mention anything about RPCs. Having methods that can run on either the front end or the back end with basically zero boilerplate was an incredible idea which unfortunately never really got traction. A few comments:<p>I think that HTML over the wire is still pretty context-specific. There&#x27;s even modern cases where I think it makes sense to just render whatever blob you get over the wire.<p>I don&#x27;t think that &quot;Database Everywhere&quot; deserves a thumbs down. It&#x27;s an insanely useful prototyping tool, genuinely useful when trying to replicate reactivity, not to mention extremely performant for all that work it actually did (it sort of &quot;hacked&quot; this by hooking into Mongo&#x27;s oplog). Meteor&#x27;s mistake was, imo, mainly deciding to do this with MongoDB instead of a SQL variant.<p>I think I&#x27;d probably give &quot;Embrace the Ecosystem&quot; a shrug. The modern-day &quot;Ecosystem&quot; is a mess. To start a project, you need tsc, but wait not that version of tsc, and you also need React, but now you need Webpack. And also a CSS plugin, but also a SASS plugin. Oh, an SVG plugin too. But now you have a conflict. Have fun. I actually <i>prefered</i> using Meteor&#x27;s more limited ecosystem where everything just worked out of the box.<p>Also no mention of CoffeeScript (which was heavily pushed); that deserves at least two thumbs down.<p>Anyway, I miss Meteor :)<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oreilly.com&#x2F;library&#x2F;view&#x2F;introducing-meteor&#x2F;9781430268352&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oreilly.com&#x2F;library&#x2F;view&#x2F;introducing-meteor&#x2F;9781...</a>

Wow Sacha Greif, a name I haven&#x27;t seen in a long time!<p>Thank you for the good memories, I know every thing and everyone you talked about in this post. BTW, back in the days I created 2 very popular Atmosphere packages<p>I wish Meteor succeeded in becoming more mainstream, and the MDG didn&#x27;t abandon it so quickly to go after the new shiny tool that was GraphQL<p>Nowadays, there is still no equivalent framework in the JS world in terms of productivity

Author wrote a very successful book on the Meteor framework, happens to be an amazing designer, was a fixture in the Meteor community, and yet manages to be completely clear-eyed about the lifecycle of this pioneering effort. Maybe the best postmortem I’ve ever read.

I still maintain a product with a few $100K&#x2F;year revenue written in meteor. We long ago ditched the backed&#x2F;DB layer but the frontend has aged fairly well. It is still fast and responsive. I will never create another product in meteor but I don&#x27;t regret using meteor for that product. Coffee script on the other hand.... :P

I built a project that supported my PhD in Meteor.<p>My memory of it is that Meteor is fantastic, but Mongo is a nightmare.<p>I spent hours carefully designing my database so I didn&#x27;t need joins and adding indexing, but it never ran as fast as unoptimised MySQL, and had vastly less functionality.<p>Mongo was literally all hype - I find it impossible to imagine the use case. A salutary lesson in how rubbish the latest fashionable thing can be.

Real-time by default for everything is really a fun way to write web apps. A little bit inspired by Meteor we&#x27;ve build Thin Backend, which provides a real-time API for querying data and writing to a postgres database. If you&#x27;re interested, check it out at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thin.dev&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thin.dev&#x2F;</a> or check the demo video <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=-jj19fpkd2c" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=-jj19fpkd2c</a>

Most of my startup was built on top of Meteor back in 2016-2018. Although I wouldn’t make that choice again, the productivity and “wow factor” we could do with so little always impressed our customers.<p>The coolest thing about the text is seeing what the original Meteor team is doing nowadays. They went to build companies like Apollo and Chromatic and found new tech like Vue.JS and Storybook.<p>Overall, I feel Meteor was too ahead of its time - being early and being wrong are the same thing in our world. Nonetheless, if you build a great team filled with passioned people, you eventually find your “thing”. Its just a matter of time, effort and iteration.

Wow, Sacha! 10 years already. Meteor was one of the first Javascript frameworks which gave me joy. Maybe the closest to that today is Imba. Realtime all the time was performance heavy for sure but so much fun. I recently saw <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;liveblocks.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;liveblocks.io&#x2F;</a> which is trying to do realtime primitives for the current wave. Discover Meteor was one of the first &quot;modern&quot; programming framework books I bought and I still remember the book built around an example, something which was missing from a lot of books in that era. Modern JS is a complicated mess. I would love to go back to that era where people were trying to do magical things with one api call. Hooks in React is more complicated than a whole library from that era. That is not a good thing. In 10 years we should have had far more higher level tools. Wish you all the best. Meteor gave me a lot of joy. Maybe I will try building something with it again to see where it&#x27;s at.

Too long ago, I had written a lunch-planner as a joke to mock how much time we were losing by discussing what to eat at the office (and it even was used in a non-sarcastic way, to my own amazement), and I used meteor because it just worked.<p>2 years ago I wondered if it still works, installed meteor, did an update and voila! It worked, just million times faster to build and much more responsive: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;egeozcan&#x2F;lunchplanner&#x2F;commit&#x2F;91541a637531982e9c9fde6600de8e5b4920da44" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;egeozcan&#x2F;lunchplanner&#x2F;commit&#x2F;91541a637531...</a><p>Even the built-in account system still works!!<p>Of course, it&#x27;s not a serious project but I&#x27;m just very positively surprised how great of a DX Meteor has.

Meteor came out before async-await was a thing for Node. Meteor solved the callback hell with fibers. However fibers introduced concurrency bugs. A fiber has pre-emption points when doing IO. If some other code then changes some state then it can be dangerous because of data races.<p>A friend of mine got stuck on a bug where sometimes he got a different value than he expected and after a walkthrough I showed him what happened. So Meteor is not really friendly to beginners if you have the bad luck to provoke a data race.<p>This is the main weakness of Meteor. I was not surprised that MDG pivoted to Apollo.<p>My friend is still happy with Meteor, because I told him where to look for concurrency problems.

I enjoyed Meteor. Is there anything else out there right now that works as smoothly. Just install meteor and it installs a local copy of mongodb. Not a fan of mongo per-se, rather I&#x27;m a fan that meteor didn&#x27;t require me to install it at a system level but instead installed it locally in the project at the version correct for that release of meteor. IIRC it even installed its own copy of node at a certain version. Loved it!<p>When I look into other frameworks today they all seem lacking. They expect me to setup the backend &quot;how I want it&quot; and then write my own glue. (and of course make all my own mistakes). Where as meteor, &quot;it just worked&quot; out of the box

Meteor was first ever magic web technology I&#x27;ve ever used. The fetching from backend that you wouldn&#x27;t even see in developer tools, one code base for frontend backend, straight forward cli, developer selection between jquery&#x2F;react&#x2F;angular, kadira, build-in simple cordova<p>Never ever have I seen such a rich product that had everything and was easy to learn - back then their todo tutorial took less then 1 hour, after you had fully working todo app.<p>Yet too much magic was not what developers wanted, during the process you felt like loosing control over the processes you don&#x27;t understand nor have access too.<p>Compering this to building a standard app back then with REST API, and backbone&#x2F;angular&#x2F;react frontend seems like saving tons of time, yet developers decided on the latter in most of the cases.<p>&gt; It soon became clear that the community was splitting into two camps: those who appreciated Meteor’s clear value proposition of simplifying web development by providing an all-in-one environment, and those who wanted more openness towards the npm ecosystem to avoid being left behind by the rest of the webdev community.<p>That seems to be a case. Also lack of people that wanted to use this in production and cost of developers.<p>My last app in meteor was written in 2017, after hitting success everything died, even after adding 10x more CPU and RAM. Problem was that Mongo&#x2F;Magic was sending too much data, multiplying this by few thousands users caused killing node.js server in seconds. Using Kadira profiling and 2 nights of coding problem was solved and app was running fine, both web and mobile (meteor cordova). Client was happy, same with users - it was success. After investor came in, they decided it must be rewritten, because at that time, there were only 2 or 3 companies in Poland that knew that technology - investor decided its a bottleneck - whole thing was rewritten to Java Spring and Angular (or something similar).<p>PS. I wrote a post about the case in 2018 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;qunabu-interactive&#x2F;tuszama-case-study-meteor-js-app-7749d9eaeeda" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;qunabu-interactive&#x2F;tuszama-case-study-met...</a>

Used to churn out so many side-projects on meteor. My first application was a chat application, that our teams ended up using on several projects (this was before slack).<p>I remember that the effortless hosting they had setup was a dream. Still have never got that feeling again from any project.

Meteor community is the best OpenSource community I have ever worked with. Unfortunately, the framework couldn&#x27;t reach it&#x27;s goals &amp; we had to move on into other things :(

I made a few Atmosphere packages back in the day, some of them had a good # of users.<p>Aggregate database queries using Meteor (at least as of 1.0) would create an immense amount of backend overhead if you queried through minimongo. <i>And</i> the overhead was incurred as long as a user was on that page because of how the reactivity worked. I tried making a PR to optimize this but apparently it wasn&#x27;t comprehensive enough. I kept checking for years but no one attempted to fix this. Before you get nostalgic for Meteor, issues like that were awful.<p>Meteor (and RethinkDB) were just* pub&#x2F;sub you had almost no control over. Was fun playing around with, though!<p>* (also, being able to automatically add accounts and authentication was great)

I started my post-PhD career as a one-man-band &quot;full-stack&quot; shop on the back of meteor. I remember developing prototypes overnight between client meetings and blow minds with a fully functioning product deployed and functional before they even finished describing it to me.<p>I reluctantly moved on to a larger project where Meteor just didn&#x27;t make sense and it just seemed to fall apart in the rear-view mirror.<p>I have such fond memories of using the CLI to scaffold a new project that came with built in auth, UI components, and a simple, sane project structure, then deploy it with a single command...bliss.

Man, Meteor was such a game changer, and I attribute that largely to the group of people who were part of the initial team. Outside of the founders, you had people like Emily Stark, Slava Kim, Alice Yu join the core group. After leaving Meteor, a lot of them went to work at Google and other prominent companies.<p>I mean, the project had everything. Exceptional people, great funding, and the framework itself provided superb user experience. I haven&#x27;t been in the loop for many years, but I might have to put together a weekend project for nostalgias sake.

ReactiveVar was my favorite part. I wrote a clone, ReactiveState [1]. It’s a PubSub that binds to the ‘state’ of one or more React class components.<p>Also, I wrote a clone of their ‘match’ library, I call it type-check [2].<p>And I made something like their DDP for my app. [3]<p>In summary, I highly appreciate Meteor’s ideas, my app is architected based on many of them.<p>Thank you MDG!<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;uxtely&#x2F;js-utils&#x2F;tree&#x2F;main&#x2F;reactive-state" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;uxtely&#x2F;js-utils&#x2F;tree&#x2F;main&#x2F;reactive-state</a><p>2. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;uxtely&#x2F;js-utils&#x2F;tree&#x2F;main&#x2F;type-check" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;uxtely&#x2F;js-utils&#x2F;tree&#x2F;main&#x2F;type-check</a><p>3. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.uidrafter.com&#x2F;architecture-of-a-desktop-alike-spa" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.uidrafter.com&#x2F;architecture-of-a-desktop-alike-s...</a>

I still remember how hyped about Meteor me and my team were when it first came out. We built some PoCs and tested some really interesting concepts that were super easy to build in Meteor.<p>I insisted on staying away from it when building our main service, which had very high data throughput and near realtime requirements. I was very happy about this decision when we had to run away from Mongo due to some atrocious performance issues.<p>Anyway, some of the concepts and ideas that we prototyped in Meteor, we replicated in our stack (Redis pub&#x2F;sub + websockets + jQuery) with a lot more work but with zero performance problems. We would have probably not came up with such concepts and ideas without having the chance to build them in Meteor in the first place.

The one company I know using Meteor at scale (Qualia) runs each tenant in their own pod with their own DB etc. Pretty cool way to scale and not have one customer take down the platform. But when one customer gets big... :)

10 years of Meteor... Well thanks, now I feel old. I haven&#x27;t personally used Meteor but I remember looking into it seriously few times.<p>If anyone wants to explore an open-source Meteor project in the wild, a kickstarted project named Pixel Art Academy[1] comes to my mind. Looking through the repo[2] takes me back to CoffeeScript days.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pixelart.academy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pixelart.academy</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Retronator&#x2F;Pixel-Art-Academy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Retronator&#x2F;Pixel-Art-Academy</a>

Is there anything today that really chases that original, beautiful vision of Meteor: To be a platform that would allow ordinary smart people who are NOT programmers to develop real, solid, fully capable web applications?<p>I haven&#x27;t looked at all the low-code&#x2F;no-code offerings out there, but most of them seem very limited compared to Meteor, either because they intentionally limit scope to make the building easier, or because they rely on heavy SaaS backends and such, rather than Meteor&#x27;s easy deployabilty to any old server.<p>Suggestions?

Meteor was my first experience with web development and I was sad to not see it gain the popularity of other frameworks.<p>I do a lot now with Phoenix and LiveView and there are a lot of parallels.<p>Crazy that it’s been 10 years.

&gt; To say nothing of up-and-coming front-end frameworks like Marko, Qwik, and Solid, which are all about giving you better control over rendering and being more efficient.<p>Curious is the omission of Svelte, which ranks pretty high in some statistics from the author&#x27;s own project:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;2021.stateofjs.com&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;libraries&#x2F;front-end-frameworks" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;2021.stateofjs.com&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;libraries&#x2F;front-end-framewo...</a>

What&#x27;s most valuable for me in this writeup are links to many cool modern projects.<p>Qwik look super interesting and I was amazed how fast and easy you can try out a framework built on Deno (Fresh).<p>I already had Chocolatey installed so it was:<p><pre><code> choco install deno deno run -A -r https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fresh.deno.dev my-project deno task start </code></pre> And I could start poking around the files of some example project and all the files seem to have a immediately clear purpose.

Meteor is meatier than a bare-bones JavaScript framework, but it could be leaner.<p>Does anyone know where to get a good Meteor hamburger menu?<p>It would be incredible if it weren&#x27;t so meaty!

Really cool seeing so many others experience Meteor as their web dev &quot;gateway&quot; drug, and cool seeing that others also hit the same stumbling blocks as I did and (somewhat reluctantly) had to learn to distance from Meteor, almost as a crutch.<p>Thanksfully new tools like Supabase and Deta provide a somewhat similar developer experience to Meteor, but it hasn&#x27;t been the same!

Remembering good old times starting learn Meteor 8-9 years ago. I was looking for a silver bullet back then. My path was like Meteor-&gt;Angular-&gt;Ionic then I end up with React. I am not looking for a bullet anymore, I am happy with the light saber since then;)

I was very enthusiastic about Meteor in the beginning. I used it for a fairly large prototype.<p>I wanted to code in Typescript but I had problems with that and eventually dropped Meteor. It really was an amazing project.

Thank you for sharing your experience Sacha, greetings from Designmodo :D