The Meteor Podcast

Meteor Monthly Wrap-Up #1: September 2020

Episode Summary

In this very first episode of our new Meteor Monthly Wrap-Up, Matt and Filipe dive in to the latest updates on Meteor 1.11, what we've done since the acquisition on Galaxy Hosting and much more!

Episode Notes

Welcome to our new show! The Meteor Monthly Wrap-Up is exactly what it sounds: A monthly podcast showcasing everything that we've done over the past month on both the Open Source side of the core framework and on Galaxy Hosting.  

This is one effort of ours to improve our communication with our community. We hope you enjoy! 

For our first episode we also did a bit of an introduction and set out the goals of the show. One of these goals is bringing more people to the platform by way of word of mouth, case studies and showcase items. 

If anyone wants to take part in a case study or have your app showcased, please email matthew@meteor.com. We have some swag to give out : -)

We also also dive deeper into the key updates we've made since the acquisition. Such as: 

If you have any feedback or suggestions, please let us know at podcast@meteor.com. 

If you're not already part of our community Slack, you can join us here.  We'd love to have you! Also, check out the Forums and our blog for additional updates and news from us. 

As always follow us on social, and rate review and subscribe for future Meteor updates!

Episode Transcription

Matthew (00:02):

Okay, welcome everybody to the very first edition of the Meteor monthly wrap up. My name is Matt Hollingsworth and with me today is my cohost who I'm sure you all already know, his name is Filipe [Nebula 00:00:00:13]. Filipe say hi to the people.

Filipe (00:14):

Hello, Filipe Nevola here.

Matthew (00:16):

So Filipe and I will be chatting with you, and this podcast is going to be a monthly segment around what we've been doing in the past month, as well as any other updates we feel like the community should know about directly from us. And this isn't directly a community podcast, but we are excited to let everybody know of why we are doing things that we are, and what the future may hold. So before we get into that, a little bit about myself. I came on after the acquisition from Apollo. My name is Matt Hollingsworth, like I said, and I do the marketing and operations for Meteor software. So excited to learn more about the community and meet everybody that's out there. So thank you so much for listening and let's get into it.

Okay. So the first section of this podcast will be a bit about what we've done since we've taken over the business. So I will start here by telling everybody who doesn't already know, there is a free trial on Galaxy Hosting, you can go on and try now. The idea with the free trial is to allow people to test their media apps in production and get up to four gigabytes of usage, absolutely free. You can try on both of our central's plan and our professional plan for free for 30 days and figure out if Galaxy Hosting is right for you. So that's the idea. If you have any questions about that, feel free to reach out to us. And we're excited to have people on and test why Galaxy is the best option and why we feel that you will save time and money doing so, but don't take our word for it, go ahead and try it out. And we hope you do.

So Filipe will give us a little bit of an overview of the tiny container. Filipe, go ahead.

Filipe (01:49):

Yeah, we had a new container size that we are calling tiny and the tiny container is designed to be used for demo apps. Then if you want to showcase your library, or something similar, you should use it this container size. And also if you have a hub project that you work in the weekends, and that we don't have a lot of users access eat every day, you should go with tiny container. It's pretty affordable. It's around $7 every month. And I think you should take a look on it and use it. And it's pretty good. You can have all the Galaxy features for less than $10.

Also previously you had a minimum charge that we were charging for the Galaxy account, but we have removed this. Then you don't need to worry about if you don't have a running app, we are not charging you any dollar, then you can just keep your Galaxy account when you want to go back and try it again.

Also, we have been doing a lot of work in our side to keep Meteor, the framework, up to date. Then right now, every major piece of Meteor, like Cordova, [Mongo DB 00:00:02:52], node JS, all the major integrations they are using the latest version. And as always, you can still plug your favorite package in and also your favorite NPM modules and Meteor should work with everything that's compatible with JavaScript in the client and node JS in the server. And that's really great. I have been using Metro for seven years and it's great to have everything up to date in my apps as well.

Matthew (03:17):

Totally. Well, thank you for that. Do we want to go ahead then and talk about Meteor 1.11? I know we've done a lot of work on that and we had 22, I believe, updates for Meteor 1.11. Super excited about that. I should've mentioned that right off the bat here, this is September the fourth. So this is going over the things we've done over the past months. We have done a lot more than what we going to go through here, but this is just over the past month. So let's start with Meteor 1.11. Filipe, let's get into this. What are the most important to key takeaways from Meteor 1.11?

Filipe (03:50):

I'd like to start with two additions for our skeletons. If you're not familiar with this term, it's like the template that we use when you create a new project. By the way, the way to create a new project with Meteor, it's very simple and you just install Meteor in your machine. It can be a Mac OS, Unix, or Windows, and then you just type, Meteor create, and you can use a few special options at like dash dash react, or dash dash add minimal, or the new options are dash dash Apollo, and dash dash view. Then with this two new options, you can already get started in a project with just one comment using Apollo in graph cloud, was in a very simple way, we are just using an express server in the cyber side, and then you can just use your knowledge about [Graphio 00:04:37] and you can start having your app.

And it's good to remember that in Meteor, you don't need to have two isolated pieces, one for the server, one for the client. Then the same project you have the client in the server. So it's a very straightforward way to start a new project with Graphio because you just type one command and you're ready to go. And we're pretty excited about this option.

And we also have the view template. View is a framework for UI that's growing a lot and they have the idea of templates then, if in the past year using [Blaze 00:05:10] and maybe you move to React, but you don't like React that much, you should try View because View is more similar to Blaze than React. And by the way, we also do support Blaze. We have a lot of users happy with Blaze, and we are happy with this framework as well. And we keep fixing it and keeping it up to date.

But going back to view, you also have in view hot module replacement. Then it's a very nice framework that you can use today with hot module replacement in Meteor. And hot module replacement is also coming for React pretty soon, then keep tuned for the next episode, because you are going to hear more about this.

And that's just one part of this 1.11 update. We also did Mongo DB and node JS again, we are always using the latest version of this to measure pieces in Meteor projects. And remember, we don't need to use Mongo DB with Meteor all the time, but most of the projects are using Mongo DB. Then we are always trying to keep it up to date.

And we also had from a community member called Southern, a lot of updates relate to performance in the builds time. And most of these updates are affecting Windows. And then if you try Meteor in the past on Windows and maybe your experience was not the best one, you should try again, because now in Windows, Meteor does a building place and then your rebuild should be a lot faster. And if you are having issues with real time on Meteor you should open an issue for us and we provide some instructions in 1.11 blog posts, where you can use a package to get some reports for us that would be helpful in improving Meteor even more.

And a last note about this version, we are also providing a way for you to cache your [inaudible 00:06:53] when you are deploying to [Valex 00:06:55]. Then if you need to deploy the same app to different environments, for example, production, or any staging, you can just use this new option that's dash dash cache built, and then your build is going to be skip in the second round. And then it will be a lot faster because you just need to upload the file to Galaxy.

And if you are using gitch in your deployed command, you can always use dash dash cache build because if they commit to the same, we are going to use the cache, otherwise we're going to drop the cache. Then you are safe to deploy the exact same code all the time.

And as always these release, we almost don't have any breaking change. We just have one breaking change, but it's really not a big change. It's just a concern that the way the email packages checking for the DNS is different in this version of node. But that's not really a break change should not break for anyone, but it's just a note for you to test your emails after upgrading, but it should be straightforward, major update, and it should be ready to go, and then you'll meet your [inaudible 00:07:53].

Matthew (07:53):

Awesome. Thank you Filipe. That was a lot of information. If anybody has any questions about that, the first place you should look is on our blog release as well. We offer some more information in there. As always, we have our docs that are going to be updated with this new release, as well as our forums and the Slack community. But we'll get into that in a bit as well, but there's always information out there if you choose to look for it. This podcast is mostly just to give an overview of what we've done and why we're excited about it, but as always go to those resources if you have any more questions.

All right, so let's get into the Galaxy side. One of the things that we are doing here and we've tried to focus on is to make Galaxy more fully featured and really make Galaxy the best option for hosting Meteor applications.

So we are excited to announce, if you don't already know, that Galaxy got a lot more secure with our release of two factor authentication, the way you go ahead and enable that is you go to your MDA account, your media developer account, and you can go to the dashboard and you can enable two factor. Right now it's just for email, but of course, two factor was critical for us to level up our security and you can go ahead and enable that if you haven't already done so.

One other big piece of the security updates that we've been doing with Galaxy is all applications on Galaxy now have what we call app protection. And what we mean by that is a layer in Galaxy that will protect your app from malicious attacks just by pinging your app a number of times and causing it to go down. So that is default now on any Meteor application within Galaxy. So we are excited about that.

If you are a Galaxy client and have questions about that, or if you want us to configure it differently for you, we're happy to help you as always. Please ask any questions to our support inbox at support@meteor.com. It's the best way to get in touch with us and we will get to you as soon as possible. Also again, that we have the forums and the Slack community, but the support at meteor.com is the best way to get direct feedback from us.

So one other the thing that we've added to Galaxy that we're excited about as well is the UI log improvement, while it has some room for improvement, at least. So we were excited to roll that out to our Galaxy customers. So it should be a lot easier for you to go into your logs and check out what's been going on with your app. So excited to release that, and if you haven't done so please check that out on the Galaxy dashboard.

Filipe (10:13):

Okay. Continuing with more news, these are not really about August, but as this is the first wrap up, I'm going to go back a little bit in time. Then we also allow you now to change your settings on the fly in the Galaxy dashboard, then you don't need to build a new app. You can just go through our version step, select your current version, and you can choose a new settings. I think that's pretty cool because sometimes you just need to update a key, or to change some settings, and that's a lot easier than deploy that from scratch.

We also have a feature that I was really looking for it because a few months back, maybe one year already, I have created a way to spread Galaxy and create a bot to scale up and it scaled out, but that's not the best way as we know, like [inaudible 00:10:58] cracking our website. Then if Galaxy was changing the UI, it was going to break my bot.

Then now we have built in on Galaxy a feature that they're calling triggers, where you can scale up, scale out the number of containers. You can also kill containers because sometimes you can have a lot of heavy users in the same container, and maybe that's not what you want in your app. Then you can just kil this container because as Galaxy layer is going to regulate this connections, where our client's not going to have any issues with this, but you can keep all the containers at the same level of users. Then that's a pretty cool feature. And you can also restrict this by days and times. Then you can select some days where you know you are going to have a lot of more users. Maybe you can already set your minimal containers to a different level or the opposite in a day that you should not have a lot of users. You can set the maximum. You can do a lot of different stuff with this feature.

And the main goal here is to allow you to save money, then you can just run as many containers as you want. And you can always optimize because that's dynamic and that's just working for you. You just need to put a few settings on UI and our clients are loving it. We have a few clients that had many different triggers for many different scenarios, and it is working very well.

Also, you can create these rules based on CPU, memory, connections, and even the number of containers. Then if you have a lot of containers, you can handle it a little bit different when you have just a few containers. Again, it's a really nice tool, and very customizable, and very flexible, thinking about Meteor applications.

And the last one that I'd like to highlight here is that everything that you just mentioned, it's also available in a graphical AI. Then if you need to, for example, create new domains on the fly because you have a [Mood Denis 00:12:49] app and you need to add new domains, you don't need choose a Galaxy UI if you don't want, you can just code this change and you can just call Galaxy graphical API and you can make this change.

And that's really good because we have many clients that are using Meteor as a Mood Dennis app, and then you can just provide these for your clients. Then you don't need to open a support ticket for your team and go there manually and create. And you can even provision the SSL certificate as well using the API, then check out the API, everything that you should be able to do in the UI, you should also be able to do in the API. And if you see any part that is missing, just please open a ticket. And for sure we are going to help you and support your case and API. And I think that's it for Galaxy Matt.

Matthew (13:34):

Yeah. Lots there for Galaxy, and this is going to be a once a month wrap up. So we've covered a lot of the things that we've done over the past six months or so, but moving forward, we're going to just talk about the exciting things over past months. But there's been a lot to cover and we've done a lot since we took over. And actually, speaking of that just quickly, we also did a rebrand of our main meteor.com website as well. And so designers that we had worked with us on it and they did a really good job, so we've given that a bit of a facelift because we felt that it was not representative of the future and where we want to be as a business. So that was exciting as well. Just on the marketing side, we were excited to get that out there.

And just for the future, I quickly, before we wrap up here, I wanted to talk about what our goals are and what they have been and what we are going to be focusing on the future. The goal with this, of course, is to bring energy and life back into the community and to make sure that people are excited and aware of all the things that we are doing as a business. I think that there was a long time there where there wasn't a lot going on, and the feeling within the community felt that there was a sense in the community, that there wasn't as much attention being paid as they deserve.

So part of my job is to improve our communications. We, of course, Filipe and [Reno 00:14:46] and [Denelle 00:14:46],, on the dev side are going to continue to roll out features on both Galaxy and the open source. We are always going to rely heavily on the community to help us grow and to adapt and to get better. But us as a business, we want to make sure that everybody in the community is aware of all the things and exciting things that we are doing.

My conversations so far, both open source side and the Galaxy, side have been surprising in the sense that a lot of people don't know what we're doing and my job is to help improve that. So the way that I'm going to do that is to introduce more case studies, to showcase more apps that have been built with Meteor and are deploying to Galaxy, and just to improve our communication, and make sure that people are as excited as they should be about us and what we're doing. So part of the ask with this is for help, if you love Meteor, which many of us do, tell a friend, put it on social media, tag us to engage with us, to talk on the Slack community, a channel that we have, which of course will be linked in the notes here, and really trying to bring more people to the platform because we know that it's great, but I think more can be done with getting more users onto the core platform and more Meteor users to Galaxy.

So that's the goal. If anybody wants to have a showcase on our meteor.com website, if you've built a Meteor app that's awesome, and you want to showcase it, please let us know. I will link to my email address in the notes, but those of you who care to know it's matthew@meteor.com. So send me a quick note. We'd love to work with you.

Yeah. And I'm just really excited about where things are going to go and what the team that we have here and excited about the future. So thank you for so much for listening, engage with us. Talk to us on social, like I said, and a get part of the community and introduce more people to Meteor.

If you have any questions about the show, please let us know at podcast@meteor.com and we'd love to hear from you. Just so everybody knows, we do have some swag leftover that we want to distribute. So if you get in touch with us and you tell me some feedback about the show or things that you want to see done, or if you want to engage with us via a case study and showcase that on our main page, let us know, and we'll send you some really cool swag. We have a lot of it, so let's give it away.

Thank you so much for listening to this first one. I'm sure we will get better at it and we are excited to continue on and thank you so much.

Filipe (17:02):

Hey, Filipe here again. Thanks for listening. And we are going to wrap up this far today. It's fun to say that we're going to wrap up the wrap up, but it's okay. And don't be afraid to talk to me. If you need some help, you can ask me on Slack in private. If you need, you can also mention me on git hub issues. That's okay. Just feel free to contact me the way you would prefer. Okay. See you soon. Bye-bye.