Announcing Apex Software Inc

Today I’m happy to announce my first company, Apex Software Inc.

Apex is a solo venture, for much of my career I’ve focused on technologies to help build startups — with Apex my focus will be shifting to the product level. My goal with Apex is simply to create beautiful minimalistic tools and services that people enjoy. I’m not restricting myself to any particular category, though the first few are in the developer tools domain, which I’ll be writing about soon!

I’ve always been a creative person, eager to try something new, so the opportunity to work on many small but elegant applications is very appealing to me. Lifestyle is also increasingly important, the more I work, the more I realize I should be doing things I enjoy, at a healthy pace, and not worry about the other kinds of “success”. Photography and travel are also very important to me, so I’m excited by the possibility of doing much more remote work, if you can even work “remote” as a single person without an office haha.

Apex is not VC-backed. I am bootstrapping the company with my own savings and will likely keep it that way, I’m sure this approach will have many downsides and additional responsibilities, but I think it’ll be worth it. It also forces you to spend more time with optimizations and to really consider the costs, whereas startups typically trade money for acceleration. The product’s robustness becomes more important because of this, if I plan on keeping support down, for multiple applications, I’ll have to make sure everything is operating smoothly.

I plan to be as transparent as I can about planning, results, and financials, to help inspire like-minded people who might be interested in taking the plunge. It’s something I would be interested in, so I don’t mind sharing. Since this is not a startup, and I have taken no loans, it’s important that the risks are calculated. I would much rather have 10 small products that are producing positive revenue than one large product controlling the outcome, plus to me that is just more fun! This is all new to me so I’ll be sharing my thoughts and experiences throughout.

For more back story, late last year I decided to leave my previous work to focus on health, after burning myself out over the years. It was a difficult decision to make, but everyone at work was supportive. I wasn’t sure that I even wanted to remain in the industry, but after taking half a year off to re-energize, I started programming for myself again. I worked on projects that will never even be seen, and started to enjoy the act of just sitting down with a coffee and writing some code. I’ve always been a generalist, so opportunity to work on, and learn more about every aspect of a company and its products is something I’m intrigued by.

I’d like to thank everyone who has, or will support my work, inspiring me to attempt this in the first place. I have no idea how any of this will play out, but I’m willing to take the risk and enjoy the ride :)

So far the following open-source projects have been created to support these new projects.

• apex: AWS Lambda function management
• apex/log: Structured logging for Go (basically a refactored Logrus)
• apex/httplog: Structured HTTP logs middleware
• apex/go-apex: Go runtime utilities for receiving Lambda events
• parse-curl.js: curl command parsing used for a “Paste from curl” creation feature
• go-elastic: Small Elasticsearch client with AWS sigv4 support
• react-fatigue-dev: Helper package to reduce package development boilerplate
• Various d3 packages: dot, bar, heatmap, circle, tips, and others.

I tried hard (it is difficult) to ignore “utopia” for the initial releases of products, as no one reallllly cares what you’re using behind the scenes, but I’ll likely be releasing more projects in the refactor phase.

Also just because I know this will come up, I’m not planning to productize the Apex AWS Lambda tool or anything Lambda related at the moment, but I am using it to build these products. I just liked the name :), all Apex Software products will be branded as “Apex ____”.

Edit: If you’re curious about my first micro-product, check out Apex Ping, a modern take on uptime and performance monitoring powered by serverless architecture.