Napkin Beta - Backend in the browser

I still remember the first hackathon I used Parse at. It changed the game for me. People always made fun of my coding skills bc I didn't even have my own laptop when I went to my first hackathon freshman year in college and had never really coded before then. I quickly learned how to build some stuff on the frontend but absolutely sucked at backend bc i just could never get the dev environments working and deployed right. It was so frustrating. When Parse launched Parse Cloud it changed the game for me. I could write functions in javascript and suspend them into the cloud to call from anywhere my app. Didn't have to worry about doing backend dev at all. When Parse sold out to Facebook and they shut it down, I cried. Today, I cried again. Napkin gives me hope that I can one day become the very best developer like no one ever was and build shit without needing to rely on those backend developers who would always make fun of me and tell me i wasnt a real hacker bc i couldnt build a backend. Thank you @thomaswang and @syps. Thank you for breathing new life into me as a dev. Thank you for building napkin. I can't wait to hack again and finally finish building robinclout: http://bitclout.com/u/robinclout

Okay this is one of those rare products that makes you want to come back to PH and leave a feedback. Love the GUI based editing and instant deploys. I've tried Replit before, but for backend development, having trying napkin out since the last half hour, napkin stood out to me, even in the current beta release with clear differentiated offering and production readiness. Good job you guys!

I wouldn't be surprised if this gets a bunch of hate from devs, but it may be coming from the sunk cost of having spent countless hours learning how to properly set up the infra of a backend app. Then, boom, Napkin.io makes it easier than creating a website on webflow, and no wonder some respond with doubt

Napkin is the best way to write, test and deploy cloud functions! I love its simplicity and great design.

Looks great! Congrats on your launch. How do you plan to prevent users from misusing this by using it for attacks or any illegal purposes?

Bravo Nick & Thomas 👏 this is seamless. Can't wait to share with our engineers.

Cool product @thomaswang ! Congrats on the launch!

Every time that I build the backend of an application I think about how repetitive it is. Spinning up a cloud instances, deploying a web server, serving my code in the correct way, its so tedious and automatable, yet I still have to do it from scratch every time. Not anymore I guess! This product will save me hours every time I make a new product. I can't wait to try it out. Thank you so much and best of luck!!

Cool concept and very intuitive design. Getting dev environments running is the worst and this makes it so easy. Congrats on the launch!

Napkin is awesome! It has become my starting point for getting backend for my apps up and running without even thinking about the infra. Great job guys!