The beta prototype is almost ready! The challenge in December will be finding our founding programmer (a solo React dev in need of a backend for a small project), and iterating closely with them. Please, please, please hit me up if you or someone you know wants to be our founding programmer 🙏
We ended last month feeling optimistic about the user reactions to the alpha prototype, and started this month by working on the architecture for the beta prototype. It seemed that AWS serverless could be the perfect fit. I (Steve) has long dreamed of breaking up an app into Lambda Functions, API Gateway Routes, SES calls, and other AWS services, and (virtually) never have to worry about scale again.
Long story short: I spent two weeks (10 days of which with an expensive, full time AWS consultant), and it was extremely unpleasant and slow. Ultimately we terminated this strategy, because we're not yet at the stage for scale to matter. It makes more sense to focus on getting the product right for a medium scale now, and rebuild it for bigger scales later, when we have users motivating it and more resources to fund it. On the bright side, at least I won't regret my less-scalable choice because I did give serverless a real shot.
Our new architecture is in:
I'm much happier and more productive this way. In about a week, I was able to build 10x as much as the two weeks in AWS.
Relatedly, last month I (Steve) took a fantastic branding & positioning course and developed the following purpose and positioning, respectively:
The purpose of Compose is to support programming in flow.
For solo React programmers Who are hacking on web apps Compose is a backend-as-a-service That keeps you where you want to be, working on your UI Unlike Firebase, Compose lives in your React hooks, so you don’t need to learn a query or permissions language.