Note to self, recap of business direction

(timely, since I was introducing a friend to Chamath's interviews, yesterday):

Small businesses (00,'000s of companies) as a sector are inefficient, due to a large volume of redundant administrative and operational hubris (IT, HR, compliance, bookkeeping, retail merchandising, mechanical and electrical engineering, art and copy, etc.) which is largely reimplemented within each company. It should be possible to abstract away the common elements of such business functions into an infrastructural fabric that serves all small businesses. This is the long-game, and the short-game is to maintain operations of a brick and mortar operations which serves first to establish a testbed for R&D on the long-game, and second to internally finance the first item.

R&D has proceeded over the first five years over various items in this pursuit, mostly in terms of studying what can be achieved with a skeleton crew in such businesses, how to integrate IT with upstream inventory and downstream productisation, and where built-environment technology is lacking in advancement (HVAC, as an energy concern, mostly). However the past year has been spent drilling into the software stack, and seeking to establish tooling suitable for the next decade. 

- an open source framework;

- on Node, Lambda, DynamoDB;

- hence portable to Scylla for lock-in concerns;

- implements a WYSIWYG RDBMS using Dynamo as the backend; hence low project startup costs, but will have high per-API call cost; optimised for small data ... really a tool for (a) rapid prototyping at minimal incremental cost (b) anyone doing small data work (personal projects, SMEs doing mini projects or systems like IT for a single cafe);

- v1 missed the boat on REST compliance ... I only learnt about REST in detail after I started work on this, so v1alpha is going to be a massive hack;

- v2alpha will aim for REST compliance; 

- additionally the framework is meant to be a language agnostic design pattern; Node/Lambda just happens to be the development environment for the reference implementation;

- the bigger concern is this: every web framework in various languages implements a different subset of IETF's allowances ... and implements similar subsets in totally different ways; this is ridiculous ... I don't want to have to rearchitecture my thought process every time I switch to a different language; so the goal in this vertical is to develop a platonic web framework which I can implement in any future language I care to work in. Too much work for most people. but it's what I think needs to be done for the ecosystem 😛 if we succeed, the labour savings for any users of this tool will be immense.

Anyway, that's just my self-reminder about what this business is about. We've been mostly focused on R&D instead of growth, since we ran out of cash in FY2, and entered turtle/roach mode. 

Now to the final quarter of the decade ...