Update #1
The collaborator, "eureka!", and the new blog
Hi everyone!
Zack and Warfa reporting from Pax HQ! It’s been a whirlwind few months for us and we wanted to update you (our friends & family) about the recent changes.
The 3 major updates we wanted to share are: cofounder update (Warfa), reaching “eureka”, and the new blog (Developing Pax).
New Co-founder
The first update is that the Pax team has grown from 1->2. Zack and I met organically at the end of 2022. By then, without realizing it, we had already been working remotely together for quite some time.
I graduated from my MBA at Stanford earlier that year. Through school, I had grown obsessed with figuring out how to improve the “design->dev” hand-off process. For our lucky readers that haven’t had the pleasure of dealing with this, it's the process of turning a design for a software application into the application itself. Designer’s tools like Figma have redefined the process of conceptualizing graphical user interfaces (GUIs). While these free-form tools are ideal to support creativity, it requires painstaking work by developers to turn the output (pictures) into reality. As a developer constantly faced with this work, I believed there had to be a better way.
I began building a Figma plugin called Rembo, Swahili for beautiful. My goal was to take design data from Figma and declaratively generate Javascript UI components to ease the hand-off process.
In parallel, with my newly acquired MBA skill (talking), I began to have conversations. A lot of conversations! I talked with trendy designers and curmudgeon engineers. I talked to senior developers at massive companies like Adobe that said this problem was impossible to solve and sole designers at tiny firms that craved even a marginal solution to this problem.
As I listened to all these perspectives, I began to build a matrix. On the X-axis, I put experience with the complexity of this problem and on the Y, I put optimism about solving it.
Throughout my conversations, I was constantly met with two perspectives: I named them the dreamer and the pessimist. The dreamer has touched the problem in some way but has never attempted to solve it. They can imagine a world without it and are excited to explain how this current one sucks. They were great interviews to learn about current industry practices and the issues stakeholders face. The other perspective, the pessimist, was often a dreamer who tried to solve the problem themselves. They are typically technical and have gotten far enough in their journey to touch the immense complexity intrinsic to this problem. They were great to talk with to understand the limitations they see in current technology and to learn from their approaches.
After a year of independent research, prototyping and these conversations, I stumbled on Haiku.
“Haiku exists to unify design and code: to power new creativity.”
The Crunchbase description immediately stuck out to me. It wasn’t a product; it was a vision. I dug deeper. The company had operated for 5 years. They raised money, released a few products and had since shuttered in 2021. I found their CEO on LinkedIn and shot him an In-mail. The ask was simple:
With a 99th percentile response time, Zack hit me back with his Calendly and his eagerness to chat. I quickly scheduled 30 minutes, excited for the call.
Our “30 minute” call, days later, proved to be the most insightful conversation of the past year. As I pestered Zack with questions about his thoughts on the problem, I soon found myself drinking from a fire-hose. His knowledge was both deep and comprehensive. He talked about the GTM difficulty of targeting both designers and developers. An obstacle he had faced with Haiku and I had too began to touch with my Figma plugin product Rembo. After that he moved onto the technical complexity of the problem, going so far as to compare it to AGI.
As we dug through this, knowing his experience with Haiku, I had assumed that I had met another pessimist.
It wasn’t until an hour into our 30 minute conversation, that he segued into his current work: Pax, a new user interface language. After Haiku, he had come to the conclusion that a venture-funded business wasn’t the right venue to innovate on this problem. He believed that it required an “invention” before the business and decided to dedicate the next year to that belief.
As he talked about Pax, I began to think about my work generating Javascript while building Rembo. Zack had embarked on an even more audacious project; he had decided that Javascript alone was not the right material to bridge the gap to design. It needed something tailored from the ground up. Having just spent a year myself attempting to use Javascript for this exact purpose, I understood why. The language wasn’t meant for it; attempts to generate JS from designs quickly becomes unwieldy. This results in a terrible experience for developers that is virtually impossible to sell.
Zack had decided that instead of banging on the Javascript wall, he would dig a tunnel underneath it. Having just spent a year talking to many pessimists that had starved from banging on this wall, I saw the wisdom of the choice.
By the end of the call, I knew two things:
1) I wanted to consume all the information online about Pax.
2) I wanted to work with Zack.
I had found the third section of my matrix: The Collaborator 🤝: someone knowledgeable yet optimistic about the future.
Not long after this, Zack and I decided to partner up to attack this problem. Sparks have been flying ever since and we’re both fired up about the long journey ahead!
Reaching “Eureka”
The second important update is that we’ve reached automatic compilation for Pax, dubbed “Eureka”. This has been the culmination of over a year of work on the Pax Language. It is now possible for a new developer to write a Pax app and automatically compile it for Web, by way of Web Assembly, and Mac, with LLVM. This is a massive step towards onboarding developers onto Pax and a mission critical step for our public launch!
We’re now hard at work improving the developer experience on Pax and rounding out the standard library. During this process, we'd love to chat with Rust developers! If you or someone you know works with Rust, hit us up!
Stay tuned for our alpha launch in the coming months!
Developing Pax (blog)
Finally, the last update is that we’re starting this blog as a channel to share updates and interesting ideas we encounter along the journey developing Pax! We'll cover everything from the technical aspects of Pax's architecture (hint: Rust + Web Assembly) to breakdowns of the current collaboration landscape (such as a comparison of Figma vs. Webflow).
Follow along with us and join our Discord as we explore the possibilities of creative design and development.
Thank you to all our friends and family for the support so far!
Zack & Warfa