I built a keyboard that does basically nothing (except cool thock sounds), and it was super fun.
When you start typing, you and everyone else on the page hears a Cherry MX Blue sample (a different sound per key, because I went further down that rabbit hole than I should have). A trail of recent keystrokes fades across the screen. A global counter ticks up. That’s the app.
Someone in the Elm Slack called it “a beautifully coded terrible idea,” which feels about right.
(Disclaimer, btw: that JavaScript part with the audio-equivalent of a sprite containing multiple samples was mostly Claude. Because I wanted to spend as much time in Lamdera land as possible!)
So why bother? Link to heading
I wanted to try Lamdera. The TL;DR is it’s Elm, but fullstack – meaning the backend is also Elm, and the backend and frontend share the same types (like, literally they import types from the same file!). A message from frontend to backend is just a value. As Elon said: Let that sink in.
Quite refreshing after all these years of, well, the normal approach with all the usual friction of frontend/backend coms.
So, ie: A KeyPressed value on the frontend turns into a ToBackend message the compiler insists the backend handle. The broadcast comes back as a ToFrontend message the compiler insists the frontend handle. End to end, fully typed all the way. Not only that: if/when you change your model(s) the data survives across deploys via migrations (also Elm!) the compiler walks you through (and yells at you about if you skip them). I mean… What’s not to like, and why haven’t I tried Lamdera for real before?!
It works, lamdera deploy was all it took
Link to heading
Try it. If you’re lucky someone else tries it at the same time and you can have a quite alternative version of an online chat. Source is here if you want to see how much of an actual app it isn’t.
I don’t think I have a real takeaway other than: Lamdera is as weirdly nice as people say. Please, go waste an afternoon on it!