Hi 👋 I am Erik - one of the co-founders of Infer. Welcome to the first public post from Infer. This isn't just the first public Infer post but also my first blog post - ever - so bear with me 🤗
In these posts we’ll be covering what we are working on, sneak peeks of what is coming next, our longer term plans and some of our thoughts on the data and analytics world. The aim is to put these out on a regular-ish basis while we are "heads down" building and then put out more, in-depth technical posts post product launch, which planned for the end of the year (more on this next later!).
Since this is our first post, we’ll start with “why these updates?”. In the next post we will cover “Our Big Mission”🚀 and then, eventually, the actual product 😄 This post and the next will form part of a series of posts called The Beginning of Infer - a gentle intro to the ideas and motivation behind Infer and what we are trying to achieve 😊
As with all things startup this blog is very much WIP - if there is something you think we should do differently or better, please drop me a line 🙏
As a company we aim to “build in public” and this update forms part of that. It will also include a (soon to be released) public roadmap, easy ways of providing feedback and suggesting features as well as publicly available experimental features.
Of course, we can’t always share everything 😅 but we believe that as a user of our product you are entitled to know what is going on, both now and in the future, so that you can decide whether or not you want to investment more time, money, or energy into our product.
After all, as a regular user you have probably already invested a significant amount of your time in the product and we believe that obligates us to listen and keep you informed of where the product is heading. This is especially important with an early stage product where the future possibilities are many but the present state might be slightly lacking.
Ultimately we want you, the user, to help us build the best product for you and to do this we want you to feel that your time is well spend and invested 🙏 Nothing worse than finding a product you like, becoming attached to it, only to find the parts of it you like being abandoned, or scraped completely, because, unbeknownst to you, they were not part of the core product strategy 🙇
Another path we could have taken, would have been to be open source. In fact, this was our original plan! However, open sourcing often comes with extra costs, especially in terms of the speed of execution — building highly complex infrastructure is difficult enough and making sure it is accessible and easy for others to build and run only adds to that. We therefore decided not to open source for now but instead focus on building and iterating the product as quickly as possible. But - we may return to OS in the future 😃
That was it for our first blog post and part one of "The Beginning of Infer"! Thank you for making it this far 🙏
As mentioned, the next post will follow soon and will cover the bigger vision and mission of Infer. After that we will start talking more about the actual product.
In coming updates we will also be covering our new branding and design, which we are working on, as well as discuss general trends in the data and analytics space.
Couldn't find a good picture of Ryan and I - so here is a classic picture of Dali and Man Ray on the Montmartre instead 🤷 I am a big Dadaists
Related enough to the above that I thought it okay to include -