About scope

About Draftsman Mar 16, 2021

Okay, we start building a no-code platform... How on earth do we start? Well, first we state our requirements and constraints.

Requirements

What do we want to get from a no-code platform?

Let's start with the hard parts, we like to have ZeroOps and as a dutchman, I don't like to pay. So we need support for pay as you go and at the same time make sure applications build on our platform can scale to enterprise size. We want Zero-touch deployments, because, who needs friction right? Those first two wishes scream serverless!

And our core feature, we need a "studio" environment where a user can model their business domain with the aid of visual tools.

Resume

We need a definition-language for visually describing a business domain and this language needs the ability to run on a serverless runtime.

Constraints

We are fully aware that we are not one of the companies in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. We are 2 developers building some cool stuff in their free time. This means we can't and shouldn't try to jam all supporting features you can imagine in our platform. The truth is stuff like monitoring, serverless runtimes, and automatic deployments, many companies in the world can do that better, faster, and cheaper. And more importantly, they have manpower to do it.

Scope

We will focus on one thing, the thing that has the potential to make us unique, we focus on our no-code studio.
This studio will enable you to model your domain so you don't have to worry about code or servers. At Draftsman we will worry about the code, now we only have to select a cloud vendor to worry about the servers (we will discuss this topic in a next post).

In our studio, we visualize concepts like commands, aggregates, events, and views. Heavily influenced by Domain Driven Design and Event Storming our focus is on building more complex business apps. As a result, our aim is not to enable everyone to model an application but to empower the domain experts to make an impact.