The next layer

Since I’ve started programming on my own I’ve run in to all kinds of tools and services that I had no idea existed. Things like Heroku and Recurly and Sendgrid that all conspire to make the life of an app developer much much easier.

I don’t remember the name of it at the moment but the other day I found a Rails gem that pre-builds an admin interface for a web app with most of the common features that normally you’d need to code.

Many developers practice DRY coding, which stands for “Don’t Repeat Yourself,” and these tools and services seem to embrace that mentality.

But more importantly it looks as though existing popular web services have managed to create enough of a standard practice in a number of key areas that we can now start to build and rely on a number of the basic infrastructure pieces that have traditionally been the burden of every new web startup.

That’s very cool and exciting because it lowers the barrier to entry even further, and lets us begin to build a whole new layer on the stack.