Hi everyone! We are Charly and Bryan, and we’re happy to present you Defer:
Defer allows developers to quickly create and run background jobs without infrastructure.
Background jobs are vital in building responsive and resilient web apps by moving slow code outside the users’ journey (ex: pulling and sending data to external APIs, sending emails).
Bryan and I have been working for 10 years in startups of many stages (pre-seed to Algolia or Dashlane stages).
In all those experiences, part of our work included crafting similar background jobs solutions and their internal dashboards, as Charly did at Algolia for the Shopify Integration Pipeline.
We identified a gap between current solutions and actual product needs that leads to a repeated waste of engineering time (initial cost, support, and maintenance) and bad user experiences across all companies.
As consultants, we also faced companies that preferred to keep degraded user experiences to not invest in R&D in background jobs.
All those combined experiences led us to create Defer to help companies match modern product criteria (great user-perceived performance and an increasing number of integration with external APIs) with minimum effort while keeping the developer experience at heart.
Defer enables developers to use a background jobs solution that matches their product needs without reinventing the wheel or building fragile layers.
Defer brings a unique developer experience that makes it easy to create or transform existing functions into background functions (function version of a background job) without the usual distracting boilerplate code that current OSS solutions bring:
Defer’s infrastructure then handles background function executions with the configured parallelism and retries, without infrastructure work or DevOps knowledge.
The Defer Dashboard allows developers to manage applications with multiple environments and get a sense of their product’s health with analytics and filters-rich executions list view:
Finally, developers get notified on Slack upon failure and can quickly access the execution’s logs and business metadata to narrow down the issue and keep users in the loop.
Get started with Defer in a few minutes without refactoring or configuration, and start building delightful user experiences:
Build robust web-apps with background functions
Defer aims to improve the developer experience of building background operations in web-applications. Background operations are ubiquitous in modern web applications, from interacting with third APIs to sending notifications. Still, such features always require infrastructure work from the early stage and are hard to scale at later ones. Defer envisions that developing features such as sending notifications and exporting data should be as easy as deploying your Vercel application.