Hello dev.to community!
Yesterday, I had one of those moments that I’m sure we’ve all had. I sat there, frustrated by the docs I was reading, struggling to get something supposedly simple to work, and thought „there has to be a better way“.
The Problem That Sparked The Thought
As someone who has been wrestling these problems for 20 something years now, and after spending weeks with the already existing tooling, in multiple languages, with the pressure from on high to just deliver already, I realized something; we’re all solving the same painful setup problems over and over again.
Event Sourcing is super powerful in it’s promise and potential, but the ceremony surrounding it.. Brutal.
Day 1: I built a Landing Page instead of any code
Rather than diving straight into development like my heart desires (I’ve learned this lesson the hard way previously!), I spent the day creating a validation page for what I’m calling hapnd.dev. Think of it as Event Sourcing as a Service, or ESaaS!
The core idea:
What if you could get all the benefits of event sourcing, you know, time travel debugging, audit trails, events as the source of truth, replayable projections, etc. without any of the infrastructure headaches.
What if this could augment, or even replace your current database (whether that be relational or not), therefore giving you a cost and maintenance saving?
And of course, I’ll throw in some LLM like functionality along the way, because, well, we know we want it!
Here’s what I’m proposing:
- Zero setup event sourcing
- AI-powered natural language queries („Show me all orders from last Tuesday“)
- Built-in time travel debugging
- No configuration nightmares
The Validation Test
I’m looking for 25 developers who’d be interested in this before I write a single line of code. If there’s genuine interest, I’ll build it. If not, I’ll pivot.
Check it out: https://hapnd.dev
Questions for the community:
- Have you dealt with event sourcing setup pain?
- What would make you choose a hosted solution over rolling your own?
- What am I missing in this approach?
Building in public is terrifying but I’m hoping educational. Would love your honest feedback!
Thanks for reading!