LaunchFlow Provides a Speedy Backend Solution

LaunchFlow Provides a Speedy Backend Solution

It’s far from uncommon to utilize applications for our day-to-day work. In fact, it’s become pretty difficult to avoid applications since almost, if not all, lines of work now have turned digital, or at least involve digital aspects to an extent.

For business owners or founders, for example, plenty of project planning and coordination happen offline or online through phone meetings and video conferences. This activity warrants the use of apps.

As consumers, we download these apps, and voila, they’re usable. The most we need to do is create accounts or insert our phone numbers. But have you ever wondered how these apps came to life?

When I go back and forth from one app to another to write and publish, I often think that it’s beyond astonishing how someone could create all these tiny details and mechanics. Who are the people behind this, and how do they make this happen?

They’re called developers, and their tasks are certainly far from easy. Developers can sometimes be divided into two categories, front-end* and back-end*, and they have an abundance of responsibilities. Y Combinator-backed startup LaunchFlow, founded by Josh Tanke and Caleb Van Dyke, has created a program to make a back-end developer’s everyday work simpler and faster.

*Front-end Developer: Developers that handle the “client-side” of apps, responsible for the look and feel of an app.

*Back-end Developer: Developers that focus on making the application work “inside.”

Backend Issues

Back-end developers operate within the space of anything you can’t easily see when using an app, the behind-the-scenes if you will. They manage things like writing code for a server, an application, and a database.

To make apps work, developers are constantly required to handle a multitude of cloud resources and frameworks. They need to constantly navigate across numerous interfaces, which makes their day-to-day work not only time-consuming but also slow and tedious.

These interfaces include cloud consoles like AWS, which can help developers scale and diagnose issues in the middle of producing a graphical user or web-based interface. There are also monitoring platforms like Datadog that assist developers in monitoring their app’s backend, whether in application performance, log management, or overall digital experience.

Backend developers also need to handle data warehouses*, system design tools*, and documentation or learning resources like Stackoverflow or ChatGPT. All these platforms are needed by developers to keep their apps functioning properly at all times.

*Data Warehouse: A central repository of information that can be analyzed to make more informed decisions (Snowflake, BigQuery).

*System Design Tools: Software applications or frameworks that help you visualize, model, document, and communicate your system design decisions (Lucid Chart, Google Docs).

When all that work is done, developers can finally navigate through code editors, which are programs into which developers enter their code. These programs facilitate developers so they can go through all their code files and resources.

This is a pattern back-end developers are probably already familiar with. LaunchFlow’s team, equally aware of this, wanted to create a “one-stop shop” platform to help developers manage their workloads efficiently in only seconds.

Quick Build and Access

LaunchFlow’s platform allows developers to access all the required cloud services in the same place as their code editor. This way, developers no longer need to spend so much of their time switching from one interface to another. In a profession where time is money, this platform can tremendously support busy developer bees.

Launchflow’s server-less platform provides various tools and features for developers to explore and utilize. It allows developers to develop and deploy applications by using Python*.

*Python: A computer programming language often used to build websites and software, automate tasks, and conduct data analysis. It can be utilized for various programs and isn’t specialized for any specific issue.

The platform provides links for developers to quickly navigate through all the resources they need and lets developers create an exact replica of their production stack. With these features, developers can conduct trial and error by experimenting with different resources and providers much more easily without a hassle.

If or when an incident occurs, instead of having to move in the middle of a learning session with ChatGPT to their monitoring platform to frantically find the problem, LaunchFlow lets developers access real-time logs and metrics, such as batch size, source backlog, process latency, and so on, right next to their code. This allows developers to find bugs or bad coding much faster compared to the alternative.

LaunchFlow’s platform also includes a direct link to a developer’s cloud resource, which would save them from having to stumble through massive cloud consoles like AWS, once again saving the precious time developers could spend elsewhere in the production process.

By utilizing LaunchFlow’s platform, developers can automate operational tasks that usually require a large-scale system. Aside from that, the platform is also scalable by default, meaning it could automatically perform traffic scaling. The platform will scale up when there’s high traffic and scale down when possible so the development process can be cost and resource-effective.

LaunchFlow ensures that developers only need less than 60 seconds to deploy their first application and merely 20 lines of code at the most to support most use cases.

What’s Coming

Currently, LaunchFlow supports data processing that exclusively involves HTTP connections and real-time streaming use cases. LaunchFlow’s team aims to make the platform available for developers that require support for WebSocket connections, batch pipelines, and so much more, soon.

LaunchFlow plans to develop its platform further with the $500K seed funding it has received from Y Combinator.

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