colorcal VS protobuf-rules-gen

Using thin-backend has been one of the most delightful experiences I've had making an SPA with a simple backend. The developer experience with the generated TypeScript types is particularly great, the DB migrations remind me of Prisma, and knowing I have a standard Postgres db under the hood is comforting. It isn't a large or complex app, but Marc has been super responsive to bugs and feature suggestions so it has been fun to iterate on. You can find the code at https://github.com/ianobermiller/colorcal.

1) Create my data model using https://github.com/FirebaseExtended/protobuf-rules-gen to assist creating more portable resources

A long time ago, I was the PM on Firestore security rules, which was intended to solve both of those issues.

https://github.com/FirebaseExtended/protobuf-rules-gen was the closest we got: declaring types as protobufs (because Google, of course) and then generating both security rules to guarantee validity as well as client types that would match. I wanted to add proto annotations to do additional validity (e.g. add a regex to validate the phone number string was correct, do length checks on strings, etc.).

The short answer is that backend rules engines, either in their own DSL or bolted on to e.g. SQL, are pretty tough to get right, and have a super steep learning curve. IMO, AWS API Gateway with Lambda Authorizers get this most correct.