Angular 2 First App Post-Mortem
In this postmortem from 2016, @Halienja candidly breaks down the dissolution of their startup, examining the fatal assumptions, misallocated resources, and market dynamics that led to its shutdown.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Early signals were often rationalized away instead of prompting an immediate pivot in distribution or pricing.
The psychological toll of running out of capital compounds operational friction in a solo or small team setup.
Key Antidote: Validate paying willingness before committing months to building sophisticated product features.
Community Debate Themes:
Community discussions on HN centered on identifying product-market fit early, avoiding vanity metrics, and the emotional recovery process after shutting down.
CATEGORY Postmortems & Failures →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE 52 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 29 comments
As somebody who has been writing an Angular2 app in ES6, it kind of saddens me that Google has gone all-in on Typescript despite it's glaring departure from future web standards.
Specifically, the parameter annotation syntax they use is much different from that proposed in the future ES7 spec.
I really like Angular2 but it's hard not to feel like it was created as a promotional tool for Typescript adoption.
Types in JS are mostly 'window dressing' to protect devs from themselves and allow for better autocomplete support. They come with a performance overhead so they'll be disabled in production anyway.
Anyway, it's very interesting that Op went with Redux. Redux is pretty game changing in terms of reducing the feedback cycle between changes. Hopefully, better Redux support in NG2 is forthcoming.
I hate to be cynical, but reading an article like this makes me chuckle to myself thinking about how much vitriol is still spewed at Java for its over-engineering dark ages.
I start to have flashbacks when an innocent sounding article like this has so much word soup that it has to be cross-referenced against half a dozen other technologies.
For Javascript's sake, I propose we skip the phase where we implement Enterprise JS Beans, and go straight to Spring JS so we can all finally get some work done.
``` I leveraged the Flux architecture powered by the immensely popular Redux library. For a cleaner integration with Angular 2’s injector and TypeScript’s type system, I wrote a class-based wrapper around Redux that exposes state changes using RxJS observables. Consumers can subscribe to these observables and use the Store class to dispatch state-changing actions.
``` This reads like a Markov chain generated from a pool of top voted Hacker News Javascript submissions.
Uh... I'm relatively new to JS but why the heck are you mixing Redux and angular?