I think Mike’s success is awesome. Sidekiq has created so much value for startups in our industry and can operate up to a scale very few companies have to actually worry about. Other folk have reproduced similar in other ecosystems to success as well (see Hangfire) and there’s another half a dozen ecosystems out there where a motivated person could capture the same value.
The only downside I see is that it’s definitely led to the proliferation of commercializing OSS libs by making them slightly worse on purpose and adding a “go pro!” version. All too common these days. But again, can’t blame anybody on this path - creating good software isn’t easy and people do deserve to be paid for it.
The other place ripe for opportunity is Django-admin style tools. It’s been out for a decade maintained and free and it’s just an awesome tool. There are similar frameworks in Ruby, PHP (part of laravel’s pay to play offering), and Elixir, but not too much outside that. I’m pretty darn surprised there’s no Java or JavaScript world admin framework that can be plugged into with code. (react admin and the like are too low level, and being SPA centric don’t fight the whole battle - getting 95% of the way with no code other than pointing at a model is the real value add). One could also make oodles of cash in .NET here i imagine
> The only downside I see is that it’s definitely led to the proliferation of commercializing OSS libs by making them slightly worse on purpose and adding a “go pro!” version
This is a slightly pessimistic take on open core :)
I'm personally a big fan, as opposed to libraries that are not maintained and die. Sidekiq's competitor, Resque, has a somewhat uncertain situation (it's been dead for an year or so, then new maintainers took over).
The advantage of open core is that nobody prevents devs to create their own plugins, especially for products that are accessible to developers without highly specific knowledge (say, a relational database); this is actually happening with Sidekiq - for example, there is a plugin for a more granular scheduler.
the problem is the opensource part becomes pure marketing. for example the documentation is always about how to do things the "pro" way and becomes useless and even feels sometimes hostile to people searching for alternatives
I think the lack of a dominant JavaScript domain model syntax has limited the availability of admin tools like django-admin. Maybe something driven by OpenAPI/Swagger model definitions?
It is ancient and no longer upgraded (and based on angularjs), but I'd argue that ng-admin (https://github.com/marmelab/ng-admin) is the fastest SPA/JavaScript admin framework out there. It is a bit opinionated about paging and filtering (and painful to do moderately complex UI customization), but beyond that I have seen nothing that has come close to the same level of "quickly get CRUD admin UI available" in react/vue land, largely because (similar to django) it had its own domain entity model.
The same team moved from there to react-admin, and looking at a couple of react-admin experiences I've been involved in I'd argue that it wasn't aiming for the same ease of use.
Regarding django-admin style tools, there are solutions like zk [1] & apache isis [2] for java which are somewhat comparable, though more enterprise oriented.
I'm curious about the ones you like for Elixir! I've been looking for a bit and haven't found one that seems to be maintained and close to feature parity with Django admin
Built on Postgres, it lets your background jobs achieve transactionality and consistency with your database. Its architecture is also well designed to allow it to scale up to about as much as Postgres can handle. The Pro version comes with a great web UI built with Phoenix LiveView that does just about everything one could ask for.
Ash is an amazing framework for Elixir that comes with functionality very equivalent to DRF/filtersets/etc, admin, as well as automatic JSON APIs, GraphQL APIs, plus works great behind LiveView. The maintainer is extremely active and is about to release a much improved website for getting started and learning. I highly suggest joining the discord if you are looking for Django for Elixir.
The only downside I see is that it’s definitely led to the proliferation of commercializing OSS libs by making them slightly worse on purpose and adding a “go pro!” version. All too common these days. But again, can’t blame anybody on this path - creating good software isn’t easy and people do deserve to be paid for it.
The other place ripe for opportunity is Django-admin style tools. It’s been out for a decade maintained and free and it’s just an awesome tool. There are similar frameworks in Ruby, PHP (part of laravel’s pay to play offering), and Elixir, but not too much outside that. I’m pretty darn surprised there’s no Java or JavaScript world admin framework that can be plugged into with code. (react admin and the like are too low level, and being SPA centric don’t fight the whole battle - getting 95% of the way with no code other than pointing at a model is the real value add). One could also make oodles of cash in .NET here i imagine