Directus

Directus is designed to help you go quicker. It provides the glue between the database and the application.

Developer Experience

Kevin works in a team of 5, focussed on the developer experience. Building the platform the developers use, the platform itself.

• Education: how do we help people understand what directus is, what it does, what its capable of, how to succesfully implement it.
• Community Engagement: open source on github, 13k in discord, so community support is important.
• Extensions in Marketplace: you can download and install extensions built by users and directus, ensure capabilities of extensions are meeting the needs of the developers.

How do they make money?

Directus Cloud, not completely open source. Directus Plus Open Source Initiatives, 10 points to be met to comply. Directus meets Not an OSI approved license. Future: marketplace

Choices

It’s all about trade-offs, all the way down. There is almost never an answer that will meet all your needs or expectations. At first Directus focussen on Good and Cheap. So rollout was slow.

The Iron Triangle

Venn diagram of good, fast, and cheap. You can always only pick 2.

Perfectionism

When to consider something done, good enough, or ready to go. “Extension Experts” is a program within Directus where they monthly choose extensions that will be build with certain needs, and a set cost.

Example: experimental delivery, edge case. Team member spent too much time working in circles on one bug. So decided to ship it, and see wether users will encounter the bug and how often, and fix it depending on that.

Tech Stack Selection

Where do you have knowledge? Being familiar with something means you can work quicker. What is worth your time? You can use Tailwind or something else with pre-baked components, it can be quicker, but the trade-off is that it will look and feel like every other app that uses these tools.

Performance vs Maintainability

The forever argument between engineers. By what degree can you make it more performant? How many users will use this?

Conventions when coding: focus on maintainability will sometimes mean more code, which can decrease performance. But the code will be more understandable. Directus focusses on performance.

No Tailwind. “It makes you quicker now, but if we bring on another engineer who does not know it, it will cost us more time. They will have to learn it, that will cost time. If it falls out of fashion, it will cost more time.” Their CTO does not want to use Tailwind due to maintainability.

Velocity vs Flexibility

Example, streaming: Streamyard and OBS. OBS is difficult to learn, Streamyard is easier.

Innovation vs Reliability

Business Sketch: money goes into product, product makes more money. More products, more money. Invest in experiments and research. From experiments come more products

Artificial Intelligence

Ethics. Is AI built on theft? Cost; money and environmental. Accuracy; how do you utilise AI? What are you risking when it get’s it right? Who assumes the risk if you get it wrong?

Directus is divided. Kevin and Rijk are very vocal opponents.

Directus AI

Directus takes a very cautious approach. 10 extensions in the marketplace. 3 built by contractors. Accuracy: these extensions only exist in the automation tool. They don’t do anything with data. Cons:

• A minute spent on AI is a minute spent on not making their product better for their users.
• Dependency on third party services

They are available in the marketplace, then user can pay for it themself and they are responsible for any mistakes.

Again: The Iron Triangle!

Tools for decision making

• Cost Benefit Analysis
  • money, time compared to benefit
• SWOT
• Weighted Decision Matrix

Using Directus

Directus is a low level paltform, with a lot of use cases.

• High quality
• Speed

Developers love directus, content managers not so much. For example, Storyblok is a much more visual, website builder-esque, platform.

“Directus is an okay CMS, there are better ones out there.”

Take aways

The tech you use probably doesn’t matter. The users don’t care. Only at a huge scale.

You’re going to make shitty decisions. That’s okay. Understand what portion of the venn diagram you sacrificed. Engage with it, own it, do better next time.

Root decisions in user needs. Remember there are a set of distinct stakeholders when working a project; users, developers, finance guy, authors, Internal stakeholders can be trained, they are motivated to adapt because they are working for you.

Impostor Syndrome

Kevin’s personal project, yougotthis.io, with learning resources, such as videos or articles.

There’s a saying; if you’re not experiencing impostor syndrome, you’re probably not that good.

It’s an irrational feeling. It’s natural. Own it.

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