The Beauty Of The Hack

(And Why We Built Dexter)

My first hack…

Remember your first Frankenstein?

You know, the one you cobbled together from three web services, two libraries, a data feed and a tiny bit of code? Every developer had one of those projects. Explaining your creation to peers drew equal looks of disgust and amazement. It was ugly, but it worked, dammit.

My favorite hack was an absolute doozy. A video transcoder monitored a folder on my hard drive for new videos, transcoded them to mp4s, uploaded them to a web server, generated an RSS feed, and kicked off an iTunes Podcast sync. This concoction of digital spit, glue and chewing gum assured I’d wake up with the latest episode of “Lost” loaded before it was available in the iTunes store. It was a monster. I was so proud of that monster. Once it ran a few times, I quickly showed it off to my roommate. He loved it so much he uttered the words no developer wants to hear when showing off a hack:

“Can you set that up for me?”

Luckily, he noticed the painful look on my face and let me off the hook. The only thing more painful than getting a hack to work for yourself is to try and get it to work for someone else — not to mention supporting it for them.

Enter Dexter

For the past year, our small team has been working out of betaworks on Dexter — a platform to connect the web. Dexter supports users of ranging technical knowhow, from the developer to the hacker to the weekend tinkerer. Whether it is in the form of a Slackbot powered by a Google sheet, a new storage solution, a better way to get the news, and yes, even a custom podcast creator, it can be built and distributed with ease on Dexter.

The Dexter Editor. This is where the magic happens.

Built by hackers for hackers, we are motivated by a few key tenets. Today, we’re excited to announce some new features in support of them:

Recycle, Reduce and Reuse: An Open Platform

Dexter is a completely open platform. Any app you create or code you push is available to the entire community. We wholeheartedly believe in open source projects, and that even incremental improvements can be the difference between good and great. Want to build a module? Cool. Here’s more than 250 you can use as a jumping off point.

Sharing is Caring: The Marketplace

Piggybacking off of that, our users aren’t just building hacks for themselves (well, they’re doing that too). They’re sharing their creations with the entire community in the Dexter Marketplace. We take care of the annoying stuff so maintenance for developers is minimal if there is any at all. So build an app and publish away. That RSS app you made yourself is probably going to make someone else’s life better, too.

Everything Should Be as Simple as Possible: OAuth Support

We initially started building simple, two service integrations. Then someone on the team would remix an app and add another. And then another. And then soon enough, a bookmarklet that was just supposed to update Asana was now also updating all our comm platforms. This came with some OAuth headaches (key juggling, a mess of private variables…). So we now support OAuth for more than twenty services with more on the way. Apps should inspire us all to dig deeper — hell, maybe even learn to code — and make the services we love work for us.

Try It, On Us

We’re still in beta. That means you can use Dexter on the house. Need help with an integration? Want to bounce an app idea off us to help you get started? Don’t see what you were looking for in the marketplace? We’re here to help! Chat with us in Slack (click the button in the footer on your dashboard), DM us on Twitter, send a carrier pigeon with an adorable little note or email us. Let’s build something great together!