Algora | Algora TV

IHP Founder Interview Highlights

Algora

Watching now

00:00 There are a lot of people that want to learn Haskell and then kind of need to get started with.

00:04 And with ITP, it's really like you can just learn Haskell along the way.

00:08 In 2016, I started digitally induced my company here.

00:12 Worked with like startups and they needed to like change stuff very often.

00:18 I always saw like repeating problems happening again and again.

00:22 Like when we were working for stuff with Node.js, we always had like a lot of quality problems.

00:28 I've been looking into Haskell, or basically the language offers a way to build much more

00:32 high quality applications.

00:34 And then I looked at the ecosystem, but all the existing frameworks in the Haskell ecosystem

00:38 were built for experts basically.

00:41 And at that moment I was still not an expert.

00:43 I was just trying to get something working with Haskell.

00:46 Because Haskell is going to compile language, you always have to basically make a change,

00:50 go to your terminal, restart the application and everything.

00:53 I just built like the initial version of what later became I2P was just a kind of optimized

01:00 dev server that then kind of automatically, whenever you make a file change, it will restart the compiler and reload the application and restart

01:08 everything, basically make a very fast feedback loop.

01:12 And then I kind of like build everything else around the database,

01:15 uh, staff, a view layer and everything.

01:18 And later it became, um, HP.

01:20 So we start using it then in like first small projects started to kind of trying out and then we could see, okay, like this works, this works very well.

01:28 I made the repository open source in like a couple of weeks before we, we, we actually

01:35 like really launched.

01:36 We posted it on Hacker News.

01:38 This post was really big and got lots of uploads and was on the front page for a while.

01:43 And yeah, and since then kind of IHP was continuously growing

01:48 since then basically.

01:49 Advantage of IHP is actually the Haskell type system.

01:52 It really provides a very solid kind of system.

01:54 We have like a schema designer,

01:55 which allows you to kind of design

01:58 like the database structures,

02:00 but you can also do this in code

02:01 or in the visual schema It works both ways.

02:06 And then, for example, we have code generators.

02:09 When you start, you just create a couple of tables.

02:11 Then you can use, for example, a controller code generator

02:14 to generate the controller,

02:16 and then you can directly use it.

02:17 Yeah, it's a very kind of frictionless experience.

02:19 It makes it very fast to build stuff.

02:21 And then on the Vue side, you also have features like HSX,

02:25 which is like type checked version of JSX for Haskell.

02:29 The total numbers of contributors to ISPs,

02:31 I think maybe around 60 or something.

02:35 I think it could be better for much, much more people,

02:37 but I think it's kind of a bit tricky

02:39 to get everything working.

02:41 Most people just want to build web applications basically.

02:44 So we are like seven

02:45 people at the moment so it's like we're a small company after we kind of launched the open source

02:50 version of course it made sense kind of to see how we can monetize it and use it kind of to grow

02:55 the company as well because i think it's like great uh like it has great potential and provide

03:01 so much value for people and it would be good if you for example could hire people to work on on the IHP ecosystem and kind of build that beyond our like contributions

03:12 we do already so we tried for example IHP cloud which was like the first kind of idea we had we

03:17 thought okay we built an hosting solution where you can just like a Heroku, but for IHP, which we did launch and

03:26 work pretty well.

03:28 But we've now discontinued actually this year.

03:31 The monetization of open source projects is really tough because you always run into different

03:36 kind of incentive problems.

03:57 So when you build something like IHP Cloud, it's not our incentive in a way to make it easy to deploy IHP apps because this will destroy our kind of hosting business in a way. If it's easy to deploy, you don't deploy for IHP cloud, you just deploy on your own. And these kinds of incentives systems are, I think, very tricky in

04:08 open source business models.

04:09 And it's very important to like carefully think about what

04:13 incentives you kind of want to do.

04:15 And so what we later came up with actually is we introduced IHP Pro and

04:22 IHP Business, which are like paid versions of the IHP framework

04:27 with certain features included that are typically needed for usage in a professional context.

04:34 And this kind of was actually, I think initially we were worried it might be very unpopular

04:39 to introduce like paid plans to our MIT licensed open source framework.

04:48 And I talked to a lot of people in the IHP community and a lot of people actually told me,

04:50 hey, I would actually be happy if IHP does that

04:53 because then a lot of people rely on IHP

04:57 to be continuously developed.

04:59 And if you pay for it, you can be like,

05:00 you have peace of mind, there's people working on it

05:03 versus when it's open source,

05:05 like tomorrow we could just like discontinue it.

05:08 Basically, there's no kind of obligation from us to continue continuously developing it.

05:14 And I think this actually shows like the power of the right incentive structures.

05:20 In that case, it's actually very well aligned with what professional users want from IHP.

05:25 We also have various like larger companies that use IHP in a professional way.

05:29 And these also then use IHP business licenses.

05:32 And then additionally, on top of that, we also offer support to companies that use the paid plans.

05:39 So they then also in some ways get in contact with us as as a consultancy basically provide services and our

05:45 experience so basically just iterate it for every way to monetize the workflow and figure out what

05:51 what what what are the problems with each model if you're around basically somewhere here in

05:55 germany not kind of fine we are hiring so that's what i'm at the moment working on so we have like

06:01 a lot of stuff going on at the moment and we just need a little bit more people i think to get everything done i prefer to hire like people in person again

06:09 it's probably a bit unpopular at the moment but in the in the past we actually hired people that

06:14 have been contributors uh also remotely so that worked uh worked well i think was people already

06:21 are very productive from the from from the goal, right?

06:31 So, so they can just get started with what we do and don't need that much onboarding kind of things.

06:32 That's also helpful.

06:33 If you are looking into Haskell, basically try it, I think it's one of the best ways

06:38 to get started with Haskell and one of the kind of most reliable ways to build web applications so it's definitely something

06:48 i would recommend everybody to check out and give it a try and build great stuff with ifp

Library