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Sam
Sam

Posted on • Originally published at blog.dotenx.com

I'm building a Canva for back-end

The story of Canva

I'm not sure if I have to introduce Canva or not, but just in case you haven't heard about it, it's what made everyone a designer!

Yes, that's what I said! It made everyone a designer.

Before Canva, we had softwares like Adobe Photoshop, and some other giants like that in the market, and if you were curious enough, designer or not, you had tried playing with them to create some digital arts of some sort.

Fast-forward a few years, Canva literally gave all of us the confidence to become a designer, where we can.

We all had cool ideas in mind, but not all of us knew all the necessary techniques to implement them; Canva gave us a chance to implement those ideas.

Like Canva, but for back-end

We, humans, are creative and have so many ideas. However, the technical challenges prevent us from implementing what we have in mind.

Implementing an idea as a web or mobile application, requires a deep understanding of so many technologies that makes it impossible even for the best of us to turn those ideas into applications.

I personally have been enjoying the freedom Canva has given me, and I wanted to give the same freedom to everyone trying to turn an idea into an application.

I knew that there are great products for building a UI without knowing how to code at all, which are at the same time flexible enough to be extended with your custom code.

So, I decided to do the same for the back-end or business logic of the applications. A platform, you can use without any coding experience which at the same time works perfectly for developers.

Fast-forward a few months, DoTenX, the platform I had in mind is in pre-alpha and many people are using it, with their valuable feedback and sometimes harsh criticism, we're moving towards our closed alpha soon.

Unlike Canva

Canva is great in what it does, but we all know it has clear limitations, which indeed totally fit the purpose of the platform.

Unlike Canva, I wanted to give the users the power to actually build whatever they could do if they wanted to implement the application from scratch, still without worrying about many things distracting them from coding.

In DoTenX, you can easily extend the platform with custom code. It's also massively scalable, and it's is based the event-driven architecture.

DoTenX is actually very powerful when it comes to event-driven architecture and e.g. you can implement scenarios like starting a Workflow whenever a file is stored on your application user's Dropbox or when they receive an email from a certain person.


If you're interested to see under the hood, you can take a look at the source code here:
https://github.com/dotenx/dotenx

Also, we post the updates, tutorials, guidelines and videos frequently on Discord.

https://discord.gg/7Zr5UYXDxU

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