2023 Q4 retrospective
Hi all! Time to take a look back on the past quarter of engineering work and how we tracked on our goals. The focus of the past quarter was on core primitives we’re missing and involved a number of open-ended design questions.
📦 Module System
Make Convex more composable/extensible by providing support for self-contained components that run in their own namespace but within the same transactional context as the caller.
❌ We came up with a great design and prototype that we’re using internally and will be getting customer feedback. We want to give a bit more time to reflect on the API and fine-tune the developer experience before launching it publicly however, since it’s quite a large change to the core of Convex.
🏃 Fun Run Rearchitect our internal systems for executing user functions to significantly increase function parallelism.
✅ Some backends are currently running on Fun Run but we haven’t yet rolled it out to all customers.
🤗 Open Source Open source the core of the Convex backend so it can be run locally by developers as a single binary.
🤷 We’re pretty close but this isn’t done until it’s in your hands. We have an open source version running internally that we’ll be distributing in the near future.
📸 Snapshot Import & Export Support backup and restore for Convex projects while maintaining referential integrity for document IDs.
✅ Shipped. We’re still making improvements to restoration for large projects. In the future we’ll add better support for storing multiple backup versions server-side.
💸 Limits and Enforcement Start enforcing limits on free accounts and charging customers for usage on pro accounts, with generous additional allowances.
✅ Shipped. We realized in the process that we’ll be able to move faster with plan improvements by using a third-party usage-based billing provider so are working on this in the current quarter.
🔍 Search Scale up vector search to be well ahead of customer workloads. Add prefix search and fuzzy search to full-text search.
✅ Shipped. We’re happy with where search is for now although can always add more features like multi-field search in future.
📝 Compliance This wasn’t mentioned in our last post but the plan was to get Convex ready for our SOC-2 audit.
✅ While the audit technically hasn’t finished it’s been going smoothly and we expect to have SOC-2 compliance soon.
Overall I’d give us a medium rating. We took on a number of fairly open ended projects with longer timelines and made good progress but going into the next quarter we want to tighten up execution a little and prioritize improving the experience for existing Convex customers with growing applications.
🏃 Fun Run Rearchitect our internal systems for executing user functions to significantly increase function parallelism.
✅ Some backends are currently running on Fun Run but we haven’t yet rolled it out to all customers.
🤗 Open Source Open source the core of the Convex backend so it can be run locally by developers as a single binary.
🤷 We’re pretty close but this isn’t done until it’s in your hands. We have an open source version running internally that we’ll be distributing in the near future.
📸 Snapshot Import & Export Support backup and restore for Convex projects while maintaining referential integrity for document IDs.
✅ Shipped. We’re still making improvements to restoration for large projects. In the future we’ll add better support for storing multiple backup versions server-side.
💸 Limits and Enforcement Start enforcing limits on free accounts and charging customers for usage on pro accounts, with generous additional allowances.
✅ Shipped. We realized in the process that we’ll be able to move faster with plan improvements by using a third-party usage-based billing provider so are working on this in the current quarter.
🔍 Search Scale up vector search to be well ahead of customer workloads. Add prefix search and fuzzy search to full-text search.
✅ Shipped. We’re happy with where search is for now although can always add more features like multi-field search in future.
📝 Compliance This wasn’t mentioned in our last post but the plan was to get Convex ready for our SOC-2 audit.
✅ While the audit technically hasn’t finished it’s been going smoothly and we expect to have SOC-2 compliance soon.
Overall I’d give us a medium rating. We took on a number of fairly open ended projects with longer timelines and made good progress but going into the next quarter we want to tighten up execution a little and prioritize improving the experience for existing Convex customers with growing applications.
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