For dreamers and doers
Engineers turn [beautiful] dreams into reality.
— The Wind Rises, directed by Hayao Miyazaki
At Deta, we are building a personal computer that lives in the cloud — a personal cloud — for the individuals who dream and do with code. We call it Deta Space. Here’s why we’re building it.
Computers, ideas, and their authors
We believe computers are incredible: one single tool can activate a tremendous diversity of human ideas. For this to happen, software developers play a magical role. They encode these ideas into a format usable to the computer, which puts them to work at a wonderous efficiency. This combination, of computers & apps, helps us throughout much of our everyday lives, automating much of the boring and routine. But it also lets us explore & author our own ideas, and create our own worlds. This is all made possible because a software developer sat down and turned an idea into an app. With computing, many of the limits of the doable are defined by the limits placed on the people sitting down and turning dreams into software.
The modern cloud: destroying dreams
In theory, combining computers and the internet is a huge win for activating these ideas. With ‘cloud computing’, software becomes accessible to any human or computer with an internet connection. An idea is not tied to a single device and it can serve others, regardless of where they are. This magnifies the limits of the doable: we can instantly interact with & use the ideas of others, collaborate on authorship of new ideas, share our own worlds, and explore the worlds of others.
In practice, there are two big problems with cloud computing on today’s large ‘public clouds’, particularly for the special group we mentioned earlier: software developers.
First, the public cloud asks way too much from developers who want to move from an idea to working app. To deliver web applications that others can use, developers have to fight a steep tooth and nail battle creating, operating, and paying for a complex web of cloud infrastructure. We think this is holding back millions of developers around the world from delivering billions of incredible dreams that do.
Second, software developers are not just authors, they are critical users of computers. Many of their most important ideas for the rest of us come from dreaming and tinkering for themselves. Personal computing empowers them to do this, but the public cloud & its apps do not. Instead, developers have little control of their own personal ‘cloud stuff’, which is crucial raw material to build on top of, explore, and extend.
Without these issues, we think developers can unlock these frontiers in their own computing lives, paving the way for everyone else.
Deta’s next act: the personal cloud
In short, at Deta we believe:
- individual software developers around the world are the key to getting cloud computing right
- the ‘public cloud’ is crippling their creativity with unnecessary complexity, costs, and limits
We’ve run into these issues ourselves and got pretty frustrated. So we decided to build a cloud that’s a lot more personal and friendly for the individual developer. We see it as two things, to start:
- a personal launchpad for devs to bring their ideas into the world with 0-ops
- a personal computer in the cloud for devs to host and use their own apps and data
Read on to learn about how the personal cloud works and some of the benefits we see for developers.