Here’s a scenario I imagine several founders and developers have found themselves in:
Potentially genius idea pops into your head > Genius way to simply test idea follows > Genius high fives go off in your head.
For the past year, my co-founder and I have been washing, rinsing, and repeating these steps across several different ideas.
The final step is actually having to build the test — which usually involves setting up a simple landing page with some text, a way to collect people’s emails to see if they’re willing to sign up, and a way to collect payments to see if people are willing to pay for said product.
After testing several ideas, having to build the same structure every time we get a new idea becomes a bit boring, and admittedly kills our excitement a bit.
I started thinking about how I can abstract the logic for each of these services so I can use them over and over again. The more research I did, the more I started looking into microservices. In short — microservices are modular functions that you deploy as standalone web services. You can read more about them here.
A good friend of mine, Keith Horwood, built stdlib — which aims to make building serverless microservices as easy as possible, essentially building a catalogue of different services that can be portable and reusable.
Using it would force me to simplify and decouple logic. This makes things easier to test and maintain in the long-run. Also, it makes it possible to horizontally scale up a system very well. So I started using it for our tests!
I’m starting to build a collection of microservices that I generally use for my testing of new ideas. As I’m going through them, I’ll start open-sourcing some of them since they may be useful to other people wanting to quickly implement something without having to worry about building custom logic or running servers.
My first microservice
The first of these open-source functions that I built is called stripe-f: http://stdlib.com/services/nemo/stripe
It allows you create serverless landing pages that have payment functionality in minutes. You can find a working example here. It’s using a Stripe test environment, so you can use one of their test credit cards: 4242 4242 4242 4242.
Now next time I need to integrate Stripe into a test, or side project, I can easily re-use this function without having to read Stripe’s docs all over again and remember how their stuff works. I literally copy and paste the <form> to another page and it’s ready to charge people.
I’ll be posting more microservices that I find useful, so if you want to keep track of them, make sure to follow my posts.