452 karma · joined October 26, 2012
Why SynthQL? My experience working for +10 years on enterprise SaaS is that a quite often you just want a database and a way to fetch data from it. Backends will quite often get in the way adding abstractions and layers upon layers of transformation between DB objects to domain objects to DTOs.
If you ever feel like you just want to talk to the database directly, give SynthQL a try :)
If this sounds interesting to you, ping me (email on my profile) :)
1. Try to solve the smallest (but similar) problem you can think of. You'll learn a lot along the way and might figure out if it is doable or not. As a reminder, just because a problem is solvable doesn't mean it's solvable at an acceptable level of cost/time/effort. Solving a similar, but smaller problem will help you estimate the feasibility of the larger problem.
2. If the problem is worth solving, it's probably affecting people who in turn have tried to solve it before and are using either approximations or imperfect solutions. Talk to them, understand what they've tried, what works and what doesn't. If the problem affects enough people It's very likely that a solution exists already, it just hasn't been generalised, productised, or automated yet.
Instead of dealing with the "technical debt" that we've built on earth over the past couple thousand years, the proposal is that we start off with a clean slate.
I'm not saying it can't work, but if software engineering has thought us anything at all it's that full app re-writes are generally a terrible idea. The sheer complexity and vast amount of unknown unknowns is what generally kills these projects and what would also kill any attempt at re-building civilisation in a foreign planet.
Don't re-write, refactor and fix the bugs on earth.
They even talk specifically about about applying stable diffusion and spectrograms.
Do you want a drink? No, I'm not someone who drinks.
This technique is not specific to alcohol, I used it to stop smoking many years ago. I believe it has roots in Buddhism. The idea is to dissociate the "I" with the habit that you want to get rid of.
Also backed by YC.
A few more questions
# Maintenance costs & agility
You're not just building a programming language, you're also building an IDE, and now a version management system (through feature flags).
Each of these tasks are hard problems individually, what gives you the confidence that a small startup can build all of them? All of this while trying to make your company profitable.
# Ecosystem
If your language is not hosted, how do you plan on building an eco-system around it. (I know you come from a Clojure background so you've probably seen the wonders of being able to re-use Java's ecosystem).
Do I get access to the "raw text files"?
This guy is a genius :D
Many of our customers come from word of mouth plus talking to people. Its been very interesting to see the kind of tests that people built with our tool.
We're still technically in BETA although sales are going slow but smoothly. Send me a message if you are interested (fernandohur at apibot.co).
The project is still in its early stages, so expect some hiccups. All feedback is greatly appreciated :)
Keep up the good work!