atlanta-0.3

The first public release of parigot is out! Get it while it’s hot!

It’s been a long time coming. After nine months of work, we’ve made a public release. Yes, now it’s out there and you too can play with it. We have two wishes, perhaps even hopes, for this release. One, that it makes your life easier when you need to build a microservice-based application. Second, failing number one, you’ll let us know one way or another how it could be better. We have chat, a github repo, and more channels under development for you to bend our ears.

You may be wondering how something this small took nine months to build. Well, there’s a lot of reasons. The first, and most important reason, is that we wanted to feel good about what we were releasing in terms of the programming model. We knew it was going be turbulent with the built-in services and other “features” but the programming model had to be something we could live with for a while. We wanted developers to feel like it was something we had tried ourselves and thought through… because we had. We basically did two complete rewrites after our first proof-of-concept back in September because we were not satisfied with the “way it felt” for developers.

Another reason it took a while, as is often the case with startups, is that we didn’t know what we were doing! This may sound odd but it’s true. There were false starts, good ideas that were a distraction, bad approaches to things we needed, and many others. Our git history is littered with projects, programs, tools and documents that either we ultimately did not need, were moved to other repositories or we expect to go back to later. In some respects, it stinks to have all this “wasted” work, but in total it probably makes the final result that you see today better. To throw something out because “it’s not core to what we are doing” means have to know what you are doing.

This release is named for Atlanta. With the version number, it’s pronounced “atlanta-oh-three”. Atlanta got the first release name because the software was primarily developed in Atlanta and, well, A is the first letter of the alphabet. Wagering is already going on with respect to the name of 0.4, with Barça, Boradino, and Brighton as the current hot favorites, with Bologna, Brooklyn, and Berlin the longshots.