Adding additional plugins for moderation or look-and-feel customization was fairly straightforward, and I even created a plugin to make the forum content searchable with Algolia. It took about a month to get Discourse up-and-running and make authentication tied to via the SSO plugin. Discourse's own forum is very active which made me confident I could get help if I needed it. That made me confident I could modify it to meet our exact needs.

Discourse is open source, written in Rails with Ember.js on the front-end.

I looked at paid, closed-source options like AnswerHub and ForumBee and old-school solutions like phpBB and vBulletin, but none seemed to offer the power, flexibility and developer-friendliness of Discourse. Because the community was already large, I felt that a chat platform like Discord or Gitter might be overwhelming and opted for a forum-like solution instead (which would also create content that's searchable from Google). There are a ton of platforms out there that can be used to host communities, and they tend to fall into two categories - real-time sync (like chat) and async (like forums). Shortly after I joined Algolia as a developer advocate, I knew I wanted to establish a place for the community to congregate and share their projects, questions and advice. It's really changed how I write frontend code, and I feel hella confident while working with it. yeah, Apollo's been on top of it.Īnyway, big fan. Kills me to see projects that are just heads-down on their little world as the world passes them by, and so far. They're not afraid to move their ideas in other directions (integrating with React Native, for example). By this, I mean their project inertia, their progress, their ability to ship stable code - but still ship meaningful new functionality, too. They've been doing better in the last 12 months or so at making smart abstractions in the React Apollo library, to the point where I'd just get these monster all-red pull requests where I can delete all my cruddy code and replace it with far fewer lines of their great abstractions.īut from a build perspective.

I've used Relay in the past, back before they made a bunch of changes with Relay Modern (which all seem positive!), but switching to Apollo is just night-and-day. Even beyond that, it just offers a good mentality to how you should build your database-backed app. I'm convinced that GraphQL is the way forward for me, and Apollo's just a great way to tackle it. Two things you need to worry about when making a statement like that: is the tool good, and how is the tool being built?įrom a tool perspective. Apollo is my favorite open source project.

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