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Gcores

🧩 A Slice of Life

2023-08-04

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Finally, our project has reached the point where we need a user system. But I really don’t want to write CRUD anymore, so I started surfing the web.

(For friends who aren’t software engineers: CRUD stands for Create, Read, Update, Delete. It basically means writing the same boilerplate code over and over in the same way—essentially, it’s grunt work.)

Then I realized I’m totally out of touch! At this late stage of the internet wave, so many technologies have already spilled over, becoming free or cheap (compared to your business) infrastructure.

Take ChatPdf (https://www.chatpdf.com) as an example. It’s a small tool that uses ChatGPT to interpret PDFs. How was it built?

  • Core capability comes from ChatGPT
  • The user system and software backend are built directly on Google’s Firebase, meaning theoretically it doesn’t need its own cloud servers to execute product functions, while also getting rid of a ton of complex and worthless CRUD features.
  • The payment gateway uses Stripe—just configure it, no need to build a whole bunch of complex vendor integrations from scratch.

And then, a product with an annual revenue of over $100 million can run stably and efficiently! I couldn’t even find any funding records for ChatPDF online, which suggests it probably originated from some guy’s side project. How did a little software engineer become a billionaire? Well, you see, you just never know—one’s fate depends not only on personal effort but also on the course of history… (At this point, Grape jumped up and slapped me twice, telling me to stop paying homage.)

This web surfing experience really blew my mind. Being behind the times means I need to study hard! So I continued surfing the web for a few more days.

Haha, and over these days, due to the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, I discovered tons of such infrastructure products, making me deeply realize that in the future, fine-grained division of labor will no longer be the only viable growth driver. Perhaps in the future, everyone can work poetically again, relying on their creativity and truly functioning as humans.

# On this topic, I’m setting a flag here to write about my observations on a small facet of open-source software. # The third picture is Grape.

  • 🧩 A Slice of Life