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Space

Check it out 

It was the early days of nodejs and websockets. Adam and I set out to see what kinds of products, experiences, and tools could be dreamt up. This wasn’t one of those things.

Along the way we started to build the tool that would allow us to create, explore, test, and deploy those projects while allowing us to work together from a continent away.

An overview of Space

Space came about from our need to move quickly and collaborate fluidly. At the time, Google Docs led the way in multi-user editing, but there was no Visual Studio Live Share, no Slack, and no Figma.

At it’s heart space was a collaborative IDE allowing us to work in the same files at the same time. But it was also a purpose built tool around our process: in a single tool we could log, evaluate, and promote ideas; spin up a template development environment in a single click; and publish those projects to our project catalog. It even included a synced jukebox emulate working in the same physical space.

Our current stack—Notion, Figma, Gitlab, Google Cloud, and so much more—is powerful, but complicated. Tying together an ever expanding network of comprehensive tools quickly becomes a job in itself (read: devops).

Space was the opposite: it did the most with the least and in effect disappeared from our workflow. It was so effortlessly mapped to our process you didn’t even realize you had to use a tool to accomplish your task. It was simply space to do the work.