I am less worried about the classics or the depth of wisdom that I miss. I am worried about the addiction that is dangled in front of my face and normalised completely now. As for society, I think this is an uphill battle that I don’t see a real and lasting solution for it - and by “it” I mean us fellow humans in aggregate escaping this vortex of what I feel is ultimately self-harming behaviour. I hope for better regulation. I hope for better education. I hope for people realizing how harming it all is and turning around but my sense is that the shape of the world right now will make that so difficult in practice that it won’t happen.

—- Disclosure: I run a small start up which offers teachers a platform to create and conduct digital exams and interfaces with the safe exam browser precisely because cheating is the number one complaint teachers I have spoken to have when it comes to digital exams.

I am Kevin and together with my co-founder Steven I have built Intelligrade over the last 2 years. Steven is a teacher and he got sick of having to deal with outdated, overly expensive and inadequate tooling to create, conduct and grade exams. Most of them don't respect privacy either or are US based which generally disqualifies them from usage in many parts of the EU.

So we set out with a mission: Create a tool for teachers and schools that covers exams E2E. The reality is that teachers usually care about some things that we simply could not find combined in a product: They want flexible ways to create exams with different task types, they want auto-grading where possible, they want to collect parent signatures, they want to be privacy conscious and they care that their students don't cheat.

We got to work and this is our result. We tried to address all of these points and more and after two years of development and a multi month beta in stealth mode with a bunch of teachers from Stevens school we are confident enough to officially launch.

For those who are more interested in the technical aspects I thought I would share some of them: We use Nextjs as our meta framework, Sqlite for data persistence, Drizzle as our ORM and Litestream for backups. On the frontend we make extensive use of the different Tanstack libraries, Tiptap for various rich text modules and a heavily modded shadcn component library for large parts of the UI.

I will mention that the Spanish translations we use are AI generated and we are fleshing it out more as we get feedback from some of our testers. So are the cover images for our blog posts. We hope to replace them once we have some more time to flesh out our CI.

We are a small start up: Just 2 people and fully self-funded. This is a passion project of ours which we hope will help teachers in their workflows and we hope to turn this into our full time jobs if we can make this thing grow. We are super happy to hear your feedback! Feel free to ask questions, I will be around to answer them.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48600381

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

In the local first world you might have navigated away already and created 3 more issues of which 2 more failed because of schema drift or other conflicts. And you might have edited one that was deleted. And now you need to figure out what exactly to tell the user - or what not to tell them.

One thing I would like to point out though is that building a performant sync engine that behaves the way you would like in most cases is a non-trivial thing.

If two users are offline and add, edit, remove issues and come online again, you need to reason about what happens. Sometimes you can get away with Last Writer Wins but what happens if an issue is deleted and then edited. What happens if an item in a list gets re-ordered differently on different clients, what's the final ordering? In which cases can you merge what state and in which do you need to discard something. Do you show a conflict resolution UI? How do you deal with rollbacks. How do you deal with schema drift and updates on items that would be affected by schema drift? Business logic might change between being reconnects. FK constraints can shift. Can you set up your data and the sync engine so that it only syncs the minimum amount of changes and batches them correctly during longer offline sessions so you don't fire 5000 change requests after reconnecting?

I recently had to implement local first + remote sync on some fairly complex dynamic forms and where luckily there is usually only one writer and I can get away with last writer wins and reject if things are too old or if there is schema drift and can just display an error message and roll back. But what I am trying to say is: Whatever can go wrong in an online-first world, can also go wrong in an offline first world but you might get informed of that all at once at a later time - or not at all and your data is not what you think it should be. Some sync engines like zero from rocicorp has opted out of supporting offline writes entirely because of all these problems.

And just to be clear: I love offline first approaches. I yearn for fast performance. And in a lot of cases slapping a sync engine on your app can really be helpful for that if your use case allows it. But it's absolutely crucial to be aware of the pitfalls that come with it.

I agree for certain fields such as your example but until recently software engineers were in disproportional demand and that has changed pretty dramatically in less time than one would need to get a degree in the field.

Edit: And the example of people working in construction: I know a few. Their companies are booked out for the next 2 years. They, however have shitty pay and disproportionately many work-caused health problems. The owners of those companies are having a good time though.

What I will say though is that if I could go back I would probably reconsider the "everything in typescript" and "lets use nextjs, it's what everybody uses" and reach for something more performant because the things that turned out to be difficult to build cleanly again existed on the edges of all of this.

Perhaps Go or Rust for the backend, generate a client or bindings and Solid or Svelte for the frontend.