Jacob O'Bryant
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Just released: trident.firestore
10 March 2020

I’m pleased to announce the public release of my new library, trident.firestore. It’s the ClojureScript wrapper for Firestore that I mentioned I was working on last week. Take a look at the Github page linked above for code examples. If you’ve never used Firestore but are familiar with Clojure, it should be a good introduction to what you can do with Firestore.

Other than that, I have only a few quick updates:

Findka

There were about 20 signups when it launched two weeks ago. Since then, there’ve been 4 or 5 weekly active users and a small trickle of additional signups. I’m thinking a lot about the marketing/growth strategy. I’ve hired a friend who does marketing consulting to help me figure it out. So far I’m going to try at least three things to get it kickstarted:

We’re also thinking about how to encourage user referrals. That’s the main strategy long-term. I’m glad that Findka is so simple now. It makes user acquisition a lot easier than it’s been for me in the past.

And if you’ve got any suggestions, let me know. :slightly_smiling_face:

Clojure Guide

Now that the Firestore lib is released, I’m excited to start using it for the Clojure guide. I’m planning to post a new article next week. It’ll (probably) demonstrate how to build a lobby (with chat) using ShadowCLJS, Rum and Firestore.

Misc

All the work on Firestore has sparked another thing that I’m really excited about. A couple months ago I described how I had been using Airtable as an independent data store for the then-current iteration of Findka. The idea is that instead of having each website/app manage its own database, you have each user manage their own database. I won’t go into all the implications of that here, but there are big implications. I’ve now realized that Firestore would be an excellent general-purpose DB to use for this kind of thing (at least for the early adopters). Each person would set up their own Firebase instance, and then there’d be a plugin system so you could easily add apps to it (kind of like setting up your own Wordpress instance and then installing plugins for that). Each app could then be given permission to access (parts of) the same database.

Anyway. I don’t want to write too much about that idea since it’s still formulating, but I expect I’ll post an article about it within several weeks.

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