The team behind Instant, a real-time database for front-end apps, writes about sync engines, Datalog, and Postgres upgrades.
HN discusses Instant as a Firebase alternative; its founders and a Firebase founder comment, and the company has posted hiring threads.
InstantDB (YC S22) | Founding Engineers | ONSITE - San Francisco | Full-time | https://instantdb.com
We're looking for talented individuals interested in solving some of the hardest problems in real-time databases and front-end technology. If you love building delightful developer experiences and want to work on cutting-edge tech, we want to hear from you!
Our current stack: Typescript + Clojure + AWS Aurora Postgres
* We offer client SDKs, a CLI tool, and web GUI to interact with Instant. All written in Typescript
* We have a server written in Clojure for managing websocket connections, parsing queries, running permissions, and broadcasting novelty.
* All of which sits on top AWS Aurora Postgres
Open Roles:
* Typescript Engineer - Help build the best type system for our database and improve developer experience.
* Full-Stack Engineer - Build frontend sync engines and UIs that developers use for hours.
* Backend Engineer - Solve hard database problems and build infrastructure to handle 100k+ connections.
Additional details:
* Location: We're based in San Francisco, CA!
* In-person or open to relocation only: We're a small team and we really do prefer all working together in person!
* Compensation: Sliding scale between 0.5%-2% equity and 150k - 200k base + medical/dental/vision benefits
Our vision is to be the infrastructure for all apps of the future. If this jives with you we should really talk . Send us an email: founders@instantdb.com with a bit about…
[Firebase founder]
I no longer work at Firebase / Google, but two points:
1. There may be issues with the GCP integrations & UX/DX, but GCP integration is good for many customers and necessary for the future of the business.
One of the common failure modes for the 2011-2014 crop of Backend-as-a-Service offerings was their inability to technically support large customers. The economics of developer tooling are a super-power-law. So, if you hope to pay your employees you'll need to grow with your biggest customers.
Eventually, as they become TheNextBigThing, your biggest customers end up wanting the bells and whistles that only a Big Cloud Platform provide.
This was a part of the reason we chose to join Google, and why the Firebase team really really really pushed hard to integrate with GCP at a project, billing, and product level (philosophy: Firebase exposed the product from the client, GCP from the server) despite all the organizational/political overhead.
2. I'm excited to see the current crop of app platforms emerge. It has been 10 years since we launched (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3832877) and there are now some great innovations in the space. I like the way Supabase (https://supabase.com/) has exposed Postgres and InstantDB (https://www.instantdb.com) graphdb+realtime is really promising.
Thank you for trying them and providing such a detailed feedback!
- On Trip Sharing, hmm that seems weird. While I understand that there's no 'loading' indicator yet, one should be able to do so if one is the 'owner' of the trip
- Expense split: because that feature isn't there yet
- Thanks I'll consider it
- The map I chose on MapTiler is OpenStreetMap, but I limit it to Point-of-interest only, maybe I need to expand it to match more kind of objects
- Aha, for that case, I find that it's so troublesome that I have to split the activity into two different elements for display in the timetable, so I disabled the case for now. Thanks for a great use case!
- Hmm strange, the activites should reflect live. Maybe the 'back-end' is a bit slow
Anyway, the 'back-end' is InstantDB ( https://www.instantdb.com ) and it's opening a WebSocket connection, that's why you don't see network calls when doing operations
P.S. I don't think I'll monetise this ever. If someone forks it and monetise it, as long as it doesn't affect me, I think I'm fine with it. If I run out of my 'free usage' quota, I'll probably limit the users to only handful of people
What a delightful demonstration. The AI hook is brilliant, but under-explained. I expected a paragraph on how to quickly get running with my assistant (edit: https://www.instantdb.com/tutorial seems to be that, though it focuses on using the SaaS and creating an account).
It’s fun to see highly reactive apps converging on Triples, Datalog and Clojure. I never got very warm with Clojure and find Datalog a little weird, so Instant‘s abstractions are highly welcome! Surely the InstantQL-Datalog translator will be usable as a separate component, this would be super useful for me.
In general, this sounds like a lot of things done right. It sounds VERY close to just what I wish existed.
I guess I understand the choice of Postgres since this seems to be primarily focused on being SaaS. It might not matter much when the backend is Clojure anyway, but an embedded database like SQLite might make it a little simpler to deploy locally.
I've been getting into / discovering local-first databases and solutions in search of something simple & powerful to build a realtime offline-capable app (built with nextjs, react, react native), and have been playing around with Triplit which I find quite capable & easy to build with.
Here's a bunch of other links I've run across:
* https://localfirstweb.dev - List that aggregates many products
* https://www.localfirst.fm - A podcast about local-first software development.
* https://www.localfirstconf.com/ - local-first conference - many interesting talks on their youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@localfirstconf
Another promising, similar product I found is Instant: https://www.instantdb.com/, though their schema/relations/permissions are not quite as straightforward as Triplit's. However, they have written up a great article here: https://www.instantdb.com/essays/next_firebase
in case anyone finds this useful, here's the slowly growing collection of links to similar tools:
https://tinybase.org/
https://www.evolu.dev/
https://replicache.dev/
https://fireproof.storage/
https://vlcn.io/
https://www.instantdb.com/
https://loro.dev/
https://electric-sql.com/
https://docs.y-sweet.dev/
https://syncedstore.org/docs/
https://collabs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
https://remotestorage.io/
https://rxdb.info/offline-first.html
https://github.com/siriusastrebe/jsynchronous
https://www.powersync.com/
https://pouchdb.com/
https://jazz.tools/
https://www.triplit.dev/
https://automerge.org/
https://www.dxos.org/
I hope one day to try them all :-) Or read a summary from someone who does.