Founder
Austin, Tx, Us
I (accidentally) started Balderdash to build real-world use cases with Node.js. It began as a web and mobile studio with a focus on responsive design and realtime chat-like features.Over the years, I hired and collaborated with amazing people on all sorts of ideas and businesses, from startups to the Fortune 500. Balderdash took on bigger and bigger projects: larger timescales, more mature budgets, and advanced business+operational needs.Then, somewhere along the way, the open-source Node.js framework I built (only out of necessity) exploded (in popularity). At first, I thought it was a fluke with NPM statistics. I thought the people creating GitHub issues were new developers from past projects we worked on. But by 2013, it became unavoidably obvious. Turns out lots of people want to build robust, scalable apps APIs using only JavaScript. And they needed a Rails-like framework.In the space of a few months, we became "the company behind Sails.js".Every day we got to innovate on cool user experiences and solve tough Node.js technical problems for our clients. At night, we worked on the framework.Sails is free and open source software (FOSS), and by itself, that doesn't pay the bills. But the popularity of the framework brought a lot of attention, and some interesting professional service engagements. Meanwhile the open-source framework benefited from everything we learned. We worked on issues from thousands of different Sails/Node.js applications with every use case you can imagine. We made lots of mistakes. We learned loads; not just about open source community management, but about building software: security, performance, scaling, enterprise priorities, release management.In 2014, people downloaded Sails and our other open source packages hundreds of thousands of times. (Little did I know: by 2020, we would reach 50MM downloads/year.)That winter, we applied to Y Combinator.
