Ahoy! Thanks to whoever posted a link to Airframes here on HN. I'm the founder of the project.
It's been a bit of a crazy 24 hours, and I haven't had enough time to fully surface and understand the impact that the ADSB Exchange sale has on everyone, the community, and Airframes.
Most of the Airframes effort has been fairly heads down, built in a tiny corner of the community and was not prepared for the events of the last day. Until now, most people weren't even familiar with technologies such as ACARS or VDL, limited to a mostly a small cross section of the community.
It has been a careful and deliberate effort to grow feeders & ingests slowly due to the nature of the data and infrastructure/storage needed, from both discovery (figuring out the data structures) and process (how to make use of it) perspectives. Requiring much of the efforts on the backend that the currently simple web app does not exactly reveal.
A new web app in development (there are some obvious and glaring issues/quirks with it now), and several other components, such as a desktop app, a mobile app, and a multi-architecture radio-focused OS to easily setup feeders (to Airframes, and the other aggregators) that will expand to other radio interests in time. There has been a lot of preliminary work on each of these.
The plan is to open source much of this over time.
If there is interest, I'm happy to elaborate more. I have been very transparent about the development process and implementations on the Discord in realtime. You are welcome to explore the dev channels there to get more background in the meantime.
Note that due to current events, I am taking on higher traffic than usual, unexpectedly, and everyone is still trying to understand what the impact of the recent events are.
Hey, I'm Kevin (founder of Airframes), and I'd like to give some background here.
While the world has been obsessing about ADS-B, which is primarily focused on positional data, I've been building a platform that is heavily focused on ACARS (often referred to as Plain Old ACARS), VDL (the successor to ACARS), HFDL (HF-based, also containing ACARS payloads), and SATCOM (such as AoA - ACARS over Insmarsat, and AoI - ACARS over Iridium).
The information in ACARS is quite interesting, and reveals significantly more about flights than ADS-B alone. The goal of the project has always been to provide a fuller picture of what is flying, including OOOI, routing, equipment status, fuel details, and more.
Some very early feeders and enthusiasts have been feeding data and supporting the effort, and as many/most HN folks know, this is all very time consuming.
Let me respond to your points too:
1. I'm a strong supporter of open source, and conceptually even open data. Your assessment that most of the stuff is still private is true. This is a strategic decision I have made. Having watched the aggregator space for many years now, my concern was that since we're still getting things built out (and I'm the only developer), a heavily budgeted competitor (such as FlightAware) could come along and enter the ACARS space long before we were ready and make the effort pointless.
I do plan to continue to open source and open data, and as it makes sense to, at my own expense, I will do so. Especially as more people become involved and build interest in ACARS.
2. The roadmap on the trello has not been updated, because, there were very few people interested in the effort and did not really engage in using it. But there is most definitely a roadmap -- some of the things are related to API, desktop/mobile app, a radio-focused OS (initially aimed at making it easy to feed to Airframes and other aggregators, but with the goal of wider radio interests) similar to OctoPi for OctoPrint.
3. Documentation has been in the works. But, seeing as that I have a lot of priorities (and it's mostly just me at the moment), it's not complete. I was hoping to release it when more digestible/ready. https://docs.airframes.io
4. I would hope that folks do consider supporting the effort, and there are a lot of big plans for it in the ACARS space.
Also, to put it bluntly, we were not yet ready for the events that unfolded. So there are some growing pains to deal with there.
I have been making a living building Rails apps for over a decade. It’s never too late, and while Rails is no longer the cool kid on the block, it is worth learning because:
1. There’s still a market for it. It shines at early stage, and plenty of companies like it, and the community is still decent (even though the energy of the early days is gone).
2. Many other newer frameworks and languages have borrowed many concepts from Rails and Ruby. Your learnings will translate!
3. It’s not all about money. Yes, you can make great money working with Ruby and Rails, but it’s a fun language and framework that cares about developer happiness (though, yes, there’s unhappy areas). So pick a language and framework that makes you enjoy your day. That’s why I have worked with Ruby so long.
4. Diversify. It’s not just about one language and framework. Learn other things too. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket (as it sounds like you kind of have with PHP). I particularly love learning Go, Dart, TypeScript, Vuejs, Nestjs, Swift, etc. Those are just a few. The point here is you learn the fundamentals in ways you will carry to whatever your future in programming will bring by taking some learnings from each one.
5. If you don’t actually enjoy learning new languages maybe consider another career? Not saying you should drop out of programming, but do what you love. We have one life to live. As cliche as that sounds, it’s true!
