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Apply HN: Brightwork – Making APIs More Intelligent

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Apply HN: Brightwork – Making APIs More Intelligent

#1

Post by josh_carterPDX »

When building an application Developers use APIs to serve different functions. This can be payment, data, social network, push notifications. All of these APIs are pivotal in adding a robust feature set to their application. Some they build themselves, but many are used from existing companies and their platforms. However, using an API is a leap of faith. A Developer uses these APIs perhaps because of its reputation in the Developer community. Perhaps someone has used it in the past and found it to be useful. However, this is genuinely a leap of faith they take to use a tool in their application and trust it implicitly. But what happens when that trust is broken? What happens if that API doesn’t work as well or costs too much? That Developer has to dig back into their code, remove dependencies, and recode their application in a process that takes time. Sometimes lots of time.

Meet Brightwork.

Brightwork is an API Developer Tool. But it’s so much more. With Brightwork Developers can now see usage information as well as performance information about the APIs they use with their application. They can also see cost projections for their APIs as it relates to competing APIs. However, we take it all a step further. Now Developers can simply click a button in the Brightwork dashboard and switch APIs without having to write one line of code. We do all the heavy lifting in the integration layer and move the API so Developers can spend more time building applications that are agile, meaningful, saves them time, and ultimately money.

On top of offering all of this intelligence with their APIs, we’re offering full stack profiles. These are what we’re calling “BrightStacks” but are pre-built API bundles that can be used in their full stack. So instead of programming these services individually, entire stacks can now be turned up in minutes, not hours or days.

http://brightwork.io

Re: Apply HN: Brightwork – Making APIs More Intelligent

#2

Post by niklas_a »

First of all, it does feel like this solves a genuine problem. Despite standards it still feels like every external API is unique.

With that said, I'm not sure I 100% grasp what Brightwork does from your description and website. Maybe you could describe a specific use case of how it would help me as a developer?

It seems that one of the use cases is easily switching between APIs that serve the same purpose (eg Google Maps to Mapbox). How big a use case do you think this will be? Ie if I use the Facebook API there's is no replacement. I have to use their API if I want to use their platform.

Re: Apply HN: Brightwork – Making APIs More Intelligent

#6

Post by josh_carterPDX »

niklas_a wrote: post #2

First of all, it does feel like this solves a genuine problem. Despite standards it still feels like every external API is unique. With that said, I'm not sure I 100% grasp what Brightwork does from your description and website. Maybe you could describe a specific use case of how it would help me as a developer? It seems that one of the use cases is easily switching between APIs that serve the same purpose (eg Google…

Thanks for the kind words. We're pretty excited about the platform.

For our first sets of APIs we'll probably focus on payment since this is where we've heard consistently that this is a struggle. Either users cannot effectively switch easily or they want to use more than one. So we're focusing there.

As for APIs that may not have another solution like Facebook, not sure there's much we can do there. We're offering social integration for FB, Twitter, Github, etc.

Hope that helps.

Re: Apply HN: Brightwork – Making APIs More Intelligent

#7

Post by josh_carterPDX »

thehorbach wrote: post #5

Do you have any other significant advantage over Stamplay.com, than API stats about the performance? It seems that they are doing the same thing

The Dashboard houses all the information about the API. So you can see performance (jitter, packet loss, etc), usage data, and cost projections. So you can tell if an API is costing you more than a competing API. This way, when you want to switch APIs, you can do so knowing you're switching to a better API that will cost you less money. The API switching on the fly is just a bonus. :)

Re: Apply HN: Brightwork – Making APIs More Intelligent

#8

Post by josh_carterPDX »

buss wrote: post #3

How much work is it to integrate an new API into brightwork? Will all of my API calls have to be proxied by brightwork? If so, is the only benefit to lock-in the cost projection?

It takes less than 30 seconds to standup an API with Brightwork so it's pretty easy to get going. Our beta is open now if you're interested.

All of the API calls go through Brightwork's API and the benefit is that you can have all of the information you're looking for in one place rather than cobbling together a number of solutions to get the same information. In the Brightwork dashboard you can now see performance (jitter, packet loss, etc), usage data, and cost projections.

We also have "BrightStacks" which are pre-bundled APIs that allow you to stand up an entire full stack in minutes.

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