I recently read a book that talked about vision and mission, and I
realized that we really need to put something out into the world to explain
what our vision and mission are.
What our mission and vision though.
I think vision is the world that we want to create.
The one that we want to see at the end of this journey.
Mission is how we get there.
The path we choose and construct to make our vision a reality.
Let's talk about vision first.
We see a world right now, where there are loads of people who could
build amazing tech platforms that could help millions of other people.
But they don't build those platforms either because they don't have
access to the technology or the education or the current ecosystem
just doesn't support them.
What we envision with the Chewy Stack is a world where nobody hits
those barriers to access where people can build the platforms they've
imagined to serve their communities.
Okay, now let's talk about mission.
This is going to be a lot longer.
At first.
We thought we should start a bootcamp or an accelerator to help people learn how
to build digital products and launch them.
But we realized that we were particularly focused on helping people build.
So we decided we needed to come up with a curriculum that came from
our experience, building web and mobile apps for small organizations.
When I say we, I mean Éphémère Creative, which is the small digital
product studio behind all of this.
The thing is if we were going to build a curriculum based off
of our process and experience.
Well, we use a process and a stack that's really efficient to build products
quickly in a variety of contexts, but it's pretty complicated to set up
initially and can be hard to manage.
So we decided we should build some tooling to automate a bunch of the
configuration and management for this stack, which we want to put out into
the world to help achieve our vision.
Essentially that's what the Chewy Stack is.
It's a collection of open source tools that make up a really nice way
to build complex web and mobile apps that we've glued together with some
custom tooling that make them a lot easier to manage and deploy, which
should make the whole process way more accessible to way more people.
In the end, the best way to define the chewy stack.
Is probably to say that it's a framework kind of, it's a way to organize
your code for front end and back.
End features built on top of a few different services.
But unlike most frameworks, the infrastructure is actually
defined in the framework.
So the idea is that if you're using the Chewy Stack, you can use AWS without
being an AWS expert, or you can deploy to a DigitalOcean droplet without
having to learn how to do that properly.
So many tools and frameworks promise to get out of your way and let you
write application code, but there's so much variability in how to manage
infrastructure and environments, even with platforms as a service like
Heroku, that if you're a small or working solo you inevitably have to
deal with something going wrong at some point or another, as you try to
move from development to production and it just doesn't work quite right.
That's the promise of the Chewy Stack: you can build complex applications
and move from dev to staging, to prod across infrastructures and only ever
have to think about application code.
It's a set of open source services that make it easy to build web and mobile
apps quickly that are connected and managed by some more code to make things
nice and easy so that more people can build better products more easily.