Joining Transposit

I am starting a new job today. I joined Transposit as a developer advocate.

I’m excited for two main reasons.

I think that the company is in the right place to solve a real customer pain point. In my mind, this stands at the intersection of Heroku and Zapier. I love both these companies and have used them, but sometimes you need something that is more customizable than a chain of Zaps (perhaps something that maintains state or interacts with an API action that Zapier doesn’t support) and yet you don’t want to be responsible for the full SDLC of an app running on Heroku, including all the pain of deploying and building authentication. Even with Rails, you still need to snap together a number of components to build a real application on Heroku. You might reach for AWS Lambda, especially if you are only working within the AWS universe, but what if you need access to other APIs? You can pull down an SDK, but you just put yourself back in the land of more complexity.

I’ve encountered this myself and understand how much software doesn’t get built for these reasons. (Or it gets built and does half the job it could, or it gets built and turns into a maintenance problem in a year or two.)

Transposit threads this needle by creating a low code solution. You have all the power of Javascript (with the perils as well). It handles some of the things that pretty much every application is going to have (authentication, scheduled jobs, per user settings) and hosts your application for you. The big win, however, is the API composition abstraction. Every API they integrate with (full list) is just a database table. The syntax can be a bit weird at times, but the abstraction works (I’ve created a few apps). Authentication with an API is managed by Transposit as well (though you have to set it up) and you have the option of having the authentication be per user or application wide.

I think that Transposit is going to make it much easier to build software that will help automate business and make people’s lives easier. That’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. It’s free to signup and kick the tires, so you can go build something, like a slackbot that fits into a tweet.

The second reason I’m excited to join Transposit is because I’ll be shifting roles. After a couple of decades as a developer, CTO, engineering manager, tech lead and technology instructor (not all at the same time!) I’ll be trying out the developer advocate role. I’ll be doing a lot more writing and interaction with Transposit’s primary users, developers, to help make the platform into the best solution it can be.

PS, we’re hiring.