For many, software engineering is a labor of love. This is certainly the case for me — I doubt there’s been a week that’s gone by since I was ten years old where I haven’t written a line of code in some form. I speak largely for myself when I say this, but I’m sure others will agree — as software engineers we’re impatient to the point we’ll do as much work as we have to today to avoid doing repetitive work tomorrow. My largest, constantly recurring pain point as a developer is infrastructure management — it always seems to get between the things I love the most, writing code and sharing it with others. This is what led to Polybit.

Our dark logo. Polybit, literally “many bits”, is focused on helping developers with software.

Polybit is all about focusing on the two parts of development that software engineers want to spend time doing and automating away everything else. The first part is the act of creation, the awe of witnessing your code brought to life, that visceral rush when you finally solve a hard or pressing problem. The second is the ability to share these creations with others — generating value for friends, colleagues and customers. Code is not merely a job for many of us, it is our creative outlet as well. We love to write and then put our words to work for others. That’s software engineering.

The problem is that, when dealing with web development, the two processes of creation and sharing are completely overshadowed by a daunting middle step, infrastructure management. It’s painful. Hosting. Deployment. Scaling. This is mostly out of necessity. The web isn’t just big, it’s massive. Thinking on web scale is hard to truly comprehend. How do we deliver our software to millions of people simultaneously? We can’t use just one computer — we need tens, or hundreds, or maybe even thousands.

The best solutions that exist today involve using software to wrap, replicate and scale lightweight containers. But, as software engineers, we’re still forced to manage these containers… why? Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could interface with the “cloud”, and all of its power, as if it were merely a peripheral of our own computer? What if distributing your web applications and APIs to millions suddenly became trivial?

This is the future we’re excited about at Polybit. You can think of what we do like “compiling to the cloud.” Our vision is that developers should be able to leverage the power of the cloud as an extension of their personal computer. We want to enable engineers to work at scale effortlessly by providing open source software solutions that deploy with a single command and scale automatically. No infrastructure management required.

Our first piece of software, Nodal, an open source framework for easily building API services in Node.js was launched in early January and we’re very appreciative of the amazing community feedback and support. Nodal can already deploy to Polybit Cloud from the command line, and we’re committed to providing the best service possible around your APIs. This includes features like analytics and monitoring for production services which we’ll be rolling out in the coming months.

There’s a lot of work to do to continue building this reality. We’re just getting started, and we hope you’re on board for what’s next. If you’re as excited as I am, you can contact me directly — keith@polybit.com.