Introducing druta.io

Tushar Khairnar
Sep 5, 2018 · 4 min read

Today I am glad to introduce druta.io to the world. Idea for Druta has sprung from my previous software development efforts — the problems I faced, the things which took time longer than expected, things I had to do repeatedly, the things I wished already available, the things which I wished were leaner, simpler not bloated or unnecessarily complex. With the advent of cloud computing and mainly AWS it has become very easy to run the software but creating software is still challenging, especially with continuously changing ways of runtime, delivery and service.

Some of the Problems I encountered are

  • Releasing multi platform mobile application is very challenging in terms of time and resources
  • Managing 3/4 separate teams for backend, iOS, android, web is very resource intensive
  • Considerable amount of time is spent on non-functional code i.e not application logic but infrastructure and non-functional requirements like security
  • Backend requires cloud specific tools, knowledge and each cloud platform has their own tools to master

Companies like Amazon move fast because non-functional aspects are well taken care by common infrastructure. But for small startups such common infrastructure is absent. Many often CTOs or Tech Co-founders think for long term and spend most of his/her initial time in evaluating and finalizing right platform for the idea. Running startup also involves weighing different ideas and solutions for the target problem and trying few before settling down to one that really matters. In such case cost associated with trying out many ideas sometime prohibit the experiments. With limited-money or self funding , there is significant inertia against trying out one-more new idea in coming cycle. I faced many of these issue when I worked with workout.cash.

My Journey with workout.cash

I joined workout.cash(Now re-branded as hoofit.com) as CTO to run its engineering team after 5 years at VMWare where I worked on GemFire Distributed system(now Apache Geode) mainly to get away for cushy-comfort job. It is fitness app like FitBit but targeted at B2B segment. It reads your fitness data quantifies it in meaningful manner and then applies gamification techniques like badges and leaderboards. Targeted users for the app were corporate users who work at desk for long times. Central idea was — Employers rewarding their employees for taking care of their health. We had many ideas on how to increase user engagement, add value for employer management and HR teams. We chose few based on gut feeling — gut feeling of an engineer rather than what end-users would like to see and real usage metrics. In the end, we were hesitant to try out things as we went further along product development.

I also found myself rewriting same application twice — once for Android and then iOS. Apart from coding, there is significant effort involved in mobile application testing with numerous combinations arising out of OS, OS versions, Phone Screen sizes, different hardware (camera, bluetooth, sensor capability etc). I started reading about cross platform mobile development and found few options like React Native feasible. But with react native, team had its suspicions (rightly so at that time as react-native was in its infancy) resulting in inertia to experiment new ideas. We continued on expensive journey of trying out limited ideas wasting many months of time. I wished we had some tools using which I could accelerate our efforts. Druta has its root in that need I faced when I ran engineering team at workout.cash.

When discussing about Product Development Flow, Y-Combinator CEO Michael Seibel answered question about how to choose next thing to work on your product among many different ideas?

Create a process in your company to build things quickly so that you can actually see if they work or not. Then you can iterate from there..
So its far more important to have technically talented team that can build MVPs quickly in non-frustrating way and then measure the results
than it is to be super-genius who can imagine what going to happen in future without actually knowing..for the big picture you have to have your vision for for little technical things and for tactical reasons in next 3 months its really hard to nail those. Its really hard to nip those and only iterate
on things which work is far better.

What is Druta?

Druta is an answer to the above question. It is toolkit which will help founders to iterator quickly and discard non-working ideas and iterate fast on working ones. It is focused on mobile app development and offer solutions to common tasks while maintaining sound engineering quality. Druta will address two key parts of mobile solution — Front-end and Backend to solve common problems and offer accelerated development. Druta in Sanskrit means “fast”. For backend story, I am working on approach named— DrutaVahan (means fast vehicle in Sanskrit). It is toolkit which focuses on simplifying cloud application development for serverless reactive applications.

Target segment

Druta will work with Startups and small companies which don't really have technical expertise in house and want to hire a team for making their application. Druta will also help startups who want to streamline and accelerate their engineering needs.

Where is Druta right now?

Today, I am happy to open DrutaVahan — Backend component in Druta’s plan for accelerated cloud development. Vahan is a toolkit written in Java to help Java (and JVM languages) programmers to write and deploy cloud (AWS as of now) applications rapidly. Vahan comes with Blueprints which are sample applications written using Vahan. I encourage your to sign-up at this link to get access to trial version and try out DrutaVahan.

druta.io

Tech blog for druta.io

Tushar Khairnar

Written by

druta.io

druta.io

Tech blog for druta.io

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