In summary this is what we've done in September 2020:
- New console
- Full rewrite
- New design
- New logo (will be released in October 2020)
- Invoices under billing
- Better teams support
- GDPR
- Kristiania University College, Oslo switching to Nhost from Firebase
- Industry Updates
Let's dig deeper on each topic.
Console
Our old console was a MVP that I started working on in the beginning of 2019. Since then we have validated the concept and are now certain that Nhost can add serious value to businesses and dev teams around the world. It was time for a new design and a full rewrite to enable us to move faster in the future.
This work started 5 weeks ago and was completed today.
We used React (with hooks), TailwindCSS and Apollo as the main building blocks for our console.
For our rewrite, we also upgraded our own auth/storage system from Hasura Backend Plus v1 to v2. We also used our own libraries, nhost-js-sdk and react-nhost for Auth and Apollo in React. To use our own software (dogfooding) is an important part of us understanding and develop our own products for the better.
We've also added some new features in the new console.
Teams
Teams are now a main component in the console and it's easy to switch context between your personal account and other teams. This feature has been requested more often lately with more companies with bigger developer teams starting to use Nhost.
Invoices
Previous invoices are now listed in the billing section.
GDPR
We've added a GDPR Data Processing Agreement (DPA). Reach out to johan@nhost.io if your company needs one. We'll add the DPA to our legal section soon.
Kristiania University College, Oslo switching to Nhost from Firebase
More on this in a coming blog post! Let's just say for now that they were tired of Google Firebase's noSQL approach and realized that SQL + GraphQL with Nhost was a better way to build apps.
Industry updates
Some industry updates of September 2020.
Hasura announce $25M Series B
Hasura's success continue and they announced a new $25M Series B founding in September. Amazing!
Digital Ocean releases app platform
Digital Ocean releases their app platform to help developers move faster building apps. It's the same premise as Nhost: Developers should not worry about infrastructure, they should build apps. Digital Oceans's app platform also have integration with Github for a modern Git workflow.
Digital Ocean supports a variety of frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, Python, Node, PHP etc.
We’ll handle the infrastructure, app runtimes and dependencies, so that you can push code to production in just a few clicks.
Firebase releases preview environments for hosting
The title of Firebase's blog post on this is The biggest Firebase Hosting update ever? Preview channels, GitHub Actions, and more!. Question marks in titles usually means the answer is No. With this new feature Firebase developers can publish a preview environment of their frontend to a preview URL. You can also set up a Github Action to automatically publish a preview environment on new pull requests.
It's obvious that Firebase is following Vercel and Netlify, two companies that has fully integrated their product with Github with great success. The difference is that Vercel/Netlify have a direct link between their product and Github, whereas with Firebase you must install a Github Action to get it to work. With Microsoft owning Github it is understandable that Google does not want to tie Firebase with Github (yet).
