Apparently, I've been really in to PaaS.

July was a busy month. We shipped our first software to customers at the new startup, and social activity picked up as people decided to venture out in to the world again post-vaccination, but despite that, I still found a handful of new things to include here.

Interesting things from the past month:

• Tailscale continues to be one of my favorite pieces of software. They make steady improvements, both in features and quality, constantly¹. Check it out if you haven’t. Their new pricing plans make the free version really useful, especially combined with the sharing feature they released earlier this year.

• Speaking of mesh networks. I played with fly.io a little recently and it might be one of the more interesting of Heroku but not owned by Salesforce platforms that have popped up in the last few years. It’s not as first-use friendly and slick as Vercel, but its seemingly more flexible and it might appeal to you if, like me, enjoy the idea of using a PaaS, but also easy to provision ad-hoc wireguard mesh networks sound fun. This post on how their ssh feature works is great.

• Also, to continue the theme of startups making older tech seem trendy and approachable, I like where both Supabase and Planetscale are headed. Each company is taking a different approach. Supabase is trying to be a whole platform built on top of PostgreSQL and compete against Firebase². Planetscale, on the other hand, seems more focused on directly addressing the operational pains of building on a relational database at any scale³. Both of them have useful free plans, by the way.

• Any list of storage tech wouldn’t be complete without somehow working Redis in so I’ll mention Upstash, serverless redis, with a usage-based billing model that makes a lot of sense for small projects or prototypes⁴.