[TUTORIAL] First Draft of new Quickstart published

1

Hey Everyone!

Several minutes ago we pushed the first draft of a new Quickstart in the docs. It’s right here: https://docs.8base.com/docs/getting-started/quick-start.

The motivation to change the old quickstart was that it didn’t really teach you anything about 8base and gave too much code in the App-Example.

The new quickstart is designed to actually help someone get started, quickly, building something great. We’re providing Vue and React starter apps right now, though need to include:

  • Angular
  • React Native
  • Electron
  • Suggestions…?

Either way, it would be awesome if some of the community could give it a test drive and critique where it can get improved.

2

I’ll take a closer look soon, but it looks like a good start. I feel it may get involved with mutations before a person even knows GraphQL, gets into auth profiles, etc. Personally, it took a few days just to understand what 8base is, and learn GraphQL. I downloaded the app, but just to get an idea.

Maybe not the Quick Start, but I like the tutorial with using curl and setting up a few tables and fields. Very incremental and I learned quite a bit. I even took the hard route and used apollo-client instead of apollo-boost at first to really understand what is going on, but that’s just me.

3

Thank’s for the feedback @mike_ekim1024! Yeah, I get it, a lot is going on. I’m trying to figure out the best way to communicate 8base as an application platform while setting the correct expectations of what we do and what we don’t do.

Did you ever check out the https://docs.8base.com/getting-started/connecting-to-api page? It has some info about using the shell to make requests.

I was even thinking about developing an info-graphic that “maps” out 8base, lol.

4

Some feedback: The steps (preferably 1 page each):

  1. 8base setup & seed data.
    Ie set up 8base, add some data through db section. Create a graphql query and see result. Add more data via mutation.

  2. Let’s see some of that data in our app.
    Set up your local, super-sturdy github starter react app using bare essentials of best-of-breed libraries (Apollo-boost client?). Give client environment vars. Swap out the graphql query for the one we created in step 1 and tweak the component. View results.

Your first Aha! moment. In 5 minutes and at only step 2, I have info I created in a db displaying in my app. (If you need to touch on roles and permissions just to set data to Read All, then great. But, in my opinion, the current flow jumps ahead too quickly at 2.2 Roles and Permissions with non-public permissions.)

  1. THEN get into roles, permissions, auth

  2. CLI tool

  3. Serverless functions

And all that would be onboarding me to use a (hopefully solid, clean) starter app. “Like Vue instead? Here’s our Vue starter app…”

And housekeeping: the “Quickstart” link above (and some links inside of the docs) are broken. Should be: https://docs.8base.com/docs/getting-started/quick-start

Thanks.

5

Thanks for the feedback