I am a programmer who has spent the last three years prototyping, studying, and thinking about what software we need.
There is a lot of software that is just now becoming possible to build and I have been extremely excited to be exploring just some of those possibilities. One thing that has challenged me has been trying to determine which projects are the most important, so that I could focus my effort on them. Additionally, running at the scale required (~350 million people in the US and ~8 billion people worldwide [though only about half currently have Internet access]) presents many challenges that do not have many well-known solutions. Much of my last year-and-a-half has been spent searching, finding, researching, and creating tools that might allow the software I have been envisioning to be created and distributed.
At the top of my list of must have software is a publicly-owned, -built, -supported, and -maintained database of everything our leaders have ever said or done that has been recorded. The database will be web-accessible, so that anyone can quickly and easily access and search the entire known-history of a politician. Using technologies that have just become available to the web, anyone will be able to contribute live audio and/or video streams to the database as well.
There is a lot to think about with this project and I look forward to having many discussions about it. Ask me anything!
~~Edit: my comment votes and replies have been rate limited since starting this AMA. My apologies if I don't get a timely response to you, it is only because I can't :/~~
Edit2: I've been able to make some more responses ~~(though I cannot vote on comments for ~23 more hours apparently)~~. If I'm not responding to you, there is a good chance it is because I am rate limited and waiting to be able to submit my response.
~~Edit3: I'm going to try to get some sleep. I'll be back when I'm up!~~
Edit4: I'm back and responding~~, but rate-limited again~~. I will get to your question soon!
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[–] WhiteRonin 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago
So what is your stack? And what languages are you using?
I'm a partical type of guy and hate Google like interviews ;-)
[–] jsprogrammer [S] 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago
Well, I have not made any final decisions. There is a lot of interesting things going on at all levels it seems.
My prototyping has been ES6/7/8/2015/2016 on the front-end with a Angular1 base project I have. [I have some issues with react and Angular2, but I have also been looking at and playing with other alternatives (cycle.js, riot, and many others that I can't remember off the top of my head)]. For styling LESS, and in HTML I try to write custom, semantic tags.
For databases, I am partial to PostgreSQL...and I think it could work at some scale. I have also experimented with some of my own designs for a log-based (with full records) mutable store. I am leaning towards "proven and simple", so I am leaning towards Postgre, but it's possible that something else would be better suited at some point.
On the back-end, it's looking like CoreOS with either Kubernetes or my own scheduler (not built yet). I have a WebRTC signalling solution written in ES2015 [so I can run it on the server and on the client :)], so Node will probably come into play at some point. nginx has been my favorite for HTTPS and asset serving. I've also considered places for C++ or possibly Haskell, but I have not employed them in any of this work so far.
[–] voice_of_reason 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago (edited ago)
WOWOWOWOW this is complete and utter overkill, overengineering and/or overthinking.
You don't need 99% of what is in your comment if you host on literally any static content host (think CDN). Manage your content as literally any data structure that is human readable on disk. Maybe a directory per person and within that a text file providing the video's description and embed URLs. Write some simple javascript to navigate this. Store all this in a git repo. When code is pushed to the repo use a webhook to trigger the code's deployment on the CDN. Look, your followers can even submit videos using pull requests too.
Pay me a couple thousand and I'll build you this in a weekend.
[–] WhiteRonin 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
You need to watch that Kevin Coatner movie Field of Dreams.
You've got lots of got repos but most are abandoned...
Just sling something to get get that will collect text speaches and go from there.
You are way over thinking your platform.
I'm not a js guy so can't comment but if Postgres vs Maria is an issue ... Why haven't you considered mango? Or some other nosql db? Heck, a flat file would work just as well to be honest.
For giggles check out Adonis framework it's inspired by php laravel.
Shit, anything on node will be fine but I dont see why you need your pages update in real time. If you did you'd already be making cash and everything is a none issue.
[–] dingomeat 1 point 1 point 2 points (+2|-1) ago
did you go to school for this?