Chewy Stack Vision & Mission

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.