April 2022 Summaries

Gary Fung, Vice President of Engineering at Boom.tv, collaborated with Midnight Society, a game studio co-founded by video-game streamer Dr DisRespect, to facilitate the launch of their new game by engaging a large online community and ensuring robust backend support. The goal was to leverage Dr DisRespect's vast follower base to attract significant user engagement on platforms like Twitter and Discord, while shifting users to their website for early game access. Midnight Society chose Nhost for its backend solutions, which offered an open-source, serverless architecture that seamlessly integrated with Hasura's GraphQL API, providing efficient infrastructure management and CI/CD pipelines akin to Vercel's experience. This setup allowed their small team to focus on business-specific logic and rapidly launch the platform to over 400,000 users in just six weeks, enabling easy sign-ups via multiple channels and fostering increased engagement for early game access. Fung emphasizes the ease and efficiency of using Nhost and Hasura's serverless approach, which has become the preferred stack for future projects.

In March 2022, Nhost unveiled new SDKs for React and Next.js, designed to enhance the development of modern web applications by leveraging the capabilities of these popular frameworks. The React SDK provides hooks for direct interaction with Nhost, while the Next.js SDK extends this functionality with added support for Server-Side Rendering (SSR). Additionally, Nhost announced a policy to put inactive free apps to sleep after seven days to manage infrastructure costs, with an option to upgrade to a Pro plan for more resources. A new Storage UI was introduced, integrating file metadata storage with Hasura's permission system, and new sign-in options through Discord and Twitch were added, with plans to include Apple and Twitter in the future. Nhost also highlighted its support for RedwoodJS as it reached its 1.0 release and encouraged community support through GitHub to boost visibility and contributions.