ValStorm

Day 260 of my founder's journey 3 months of closed beta using my platform to solve problems for my clients. The thing works! I went into a heads down, 100% focused on the work. I am nearing the exit of closed beta. January of 2025, anyone can sign up A LOT had been learned and this one gets technical. As a technical founder, I realize I might as well just lean into it 🤷♂️ 1. Server load balancing is insanely important once you start performing thousands of hefty time consuming requests within a minute all on an automated schedule. I was sending 2000-3000 emails every 15 minutes which I noticed bogged the server down during the run. I intend to move schedule processes to their own server that can respect triggered code. I also had to upside my database to keep up with scheduled code and real time user requests. 2. Having a live, https secured, dev experience with hot reloading is a must when you build apps that integrate with other secure apps. Otherwise you'll wait 3 minutes to deploy every single change 3. No code tools feel like a waste of time for a developer in the age of AI. I spent 2 months trying to build a no code ui and automation builder but the speed that I can write both front and backend code makes the complexity of a no coder feel worthless. 4. Building a platform is filled with so many concepts. Multi tenancy, Metadata deployments, code as Metadata deployments, dev vs prod orgs, region based instances of the app, separating functionality into "apps". The list goes on. Oh yeah, role based authentication, IAM. 5. In app onboarding processes and documentation are super valuable but time consuming to build without building it into your app and database. Take the time to build your onboarding builder. 6. RBAC is wild when you decide you need to control not only create/read/update/delete access at the object level, but at the field level. Permission systems are no joke 7. Caching is a super power but darn does it introduce a headwind of "is my data stale" adding another layer of checks and balances. These are just some of the things involved in a platform. To wrap up, I think of a platform as a software with many additional infrastructure systems in place to help build other software apps that don't need to think about those anymore. Think Salesforce, stripe and twilio just to name a few. Interested in what my platform will actually do? Check out the website I built using next.js and my platform because I'm a masochist who can't stop coding everything 🫠 👉 valstorm.com #technical #founder #software #blog