To kick off the Crafting Blogs, I want to share why my amazing co-founder Yisui and I started Crafting, and what problems we are trying to solve.

Throughout my career as an engineer and engineering leader at Facebook, Square, and Lime, I learned from the real-world challenges and gained an in-depth understanding of how to set up dev environments and dev practices to ensure the best productivity in high-velocity engineering teams. I have experienced both ends of the state-of-the-art setup with one-click to get to everything you need, and dev env constantly breaking with days to fix.

I realized the similar issues and struggles that happened repeatedly at various companies as they grew, and similar internal tools were built over and over again with limited resources to patch up the issues. This is especially true for smaller companies who don’t have the luxury of hiring an in-house team to build something that is not directly related to their core business.

I have been an advisor to a number of startups, and we recently spoke with more than 100 tech companies, from startups to global brands. Approximately 95% of teams had problems with several of the following:

Many aspects of these issues stem from the practice that we have been following for decades as a software engineer: to completely rely on our local machines to handle all the development. In the cloud era, a local machine is no longer the best choice for developing desktop software that runs on a single machine. Some forward-looking tech companies have attempted to address this problem by moving to the cloud, but most engineers today still follow practices from decades prior, only developing locally.

To ensure these dev issues never arise again, we built a platform of cloud-based development environments based on the experiences from the top engineering teams. Here's where Crafting all started.

On the Crafting platform, developers can code, test, integrate, stage, preview features, pair-programme, review code, collaborate remotely, etc. like never before because of the cloud. It gives them the option to do the entire development process in the cloud. Or they can keep using today's familiar tools in our hybrid development mode to leverage the cloud in the background.

Early customers have shown a great deal of enthusiasm for the tools, and our products are being actively used every day in their work. Our customers often bring us new use cases for our platform. Happy to write more about the stories later.

It's time to upgrade to the next generation of development environments if you or your team experience any of the development issues mentioned above. The following videos demonstrate how it works (intro, 1-click dev env, integration testing, collaboration). Talk to us, and we can help.

Crafting is just getting started, we are pushing the boundaries of the state-of-the-art and actively developing more awesome tools on our platform that can 10x the development experience. Interested in revolutionizing cloud development with us? Check out our current job openings.