I recently read a book that talked about vision and mission, and I realized that we really need to put something out into the world to explain what our vision and mission are. What our mission and vision though. I think vision is the world that we want to create. The one that we want to see at the end of this journey. Mission is how we get there. The path we choose and construct to make our vision a reality. Let's talk about vision first.
We see a world right now, where there are loads of people who could build amazing tech platforms that could help millions of other people. But they don't build those platforms either because they don't have access to the technology or the education or the current ecosystem just doesn't support them. What we envision with the Chewy Stack is a world where nobody hits those barriers to access where people can build the platforms they've imagined to serve their communities.
Okay, now let's talk about mission. This is going to be a lot longer. At first. We thought we should start a bootcamp or an accelerator to help people learn how to build digital products and launch them. But we realized that we were particularly focused on helping people build. So we decided we needed to come up with a curriculum that came from our experience, building web and mobile apps for small organizations.
When I say we, I mean Éphémère Creative, which is the small digital product studio behind all of this. The thing is if we were going to build a curriculum based off of our process and experience. Well, we use a process and a stack that's really efficient to build products quickly in a variety of contexts, but it's pretty complicated to set up initially and can be hard to manage.
So we decided we should build some tooling to automate a bunch of the configuration and management for this stack, which we want to put out into the world to help achieve our vision. Essentially that's what the Chewy Stack is.
It's a collection of open source tools that make up a really nice way to build complex web and mobile apps that we've glued together with some custom tooling that make them a lot easier to manage and deploy, which should make the whole process way more accessible to way more people. In the end, the best way to define the chewy stack. Is probably to say that it's a framework kind of, it's a way to organize your code for front end and back. End features built on top of a few different services.
But unlike most frameworks, the infrastructure is actually defined in the framework. So the idea is that if you're using the Chewy Stack, you can use AWS without being an AWS expert, or you can deploy to a DigitalOcean droplet without having to learn how to do that properly.
So many tools and frameworks promise to get out of your way and let you write application code, but there's so much variability in how to manage infrastructure and environments, even with platforms as a service like Heroku, that if you're a small or working solo you inevitably have to deal with something going wrong at some point or another, as you try to move from development to production and it just doesn't work quite right.
That's the promise of the Chewy Stack: you can build complex applications and move from dev to staging, to prod across infrastructures and only ever have to think about application code. It's a set of open source services that make it easy to build web and mobile apps quickly that are connected and managed by some more code to make things nice and easy so that more people can build better products more easily.