Dark Residency

Ellen Chisa -

We’re opening up for a couple more alpha users in our residency (so far, we’ve had two people build their business on it through a similar program, see below¹). Dark lets you write a backend really easily, and your infrastructure is set up as soon as you write code.

Since it’s still quite early, there are some risks:

  • You’ll be doing things differently. Dark combines a programming language, editor, and infrastructure into a holistic system, so you won’t be using something you’ve used before.
  • Things break! The editor sometimes has errors, and there may be features that don’t exist yet. We do our best to minimize this and help you through it.

However, if you take a risk on building in Dark, we’ll:

  • Teach you how to use Dark! Plus, we’re happy to pair whenever (which means you get the benefit of having coworkers).
  • Take care of your infrastructure. You don’t have to worry about it at all. We’re the ones who get paged if something goes wrong.
  • Prioritize anything that’s blocking you. We’ll keep you productive all the time, and your requests will influence our long term product direction. You get a tool that really works for you.

At the moment, this will work best if:

  • You’re a software engineer.
  • You’re building something with a backend, such as a SaaS application or a backend to a mobile product. SPAs and microservices for existing projects are both great.
  • You’re already based in SF, and are able to commit to this for at least 3 months (excluding exceptional circumstances, of course). You’ll work out of our office at Market/Duboce in San Francisco every day, and we’ll give you a dedicated desk and lunch and snacks (we have parking!)
  • You’re ready to start ASAP: we’re equipped to have you here as early as 4/22.
  • You share our company values.

This isn’t a good fit if:

  • You’re not able to come to our office in SF for your work day, or you’re just playing around.
  • Your product doesn’t need a backend: an iPhone game with no backend, hardware, or embedded systems.
  • Your product needs complex technology outside of “regular business logic”: machine learning models, blockchain, real-time systems, or streaming video.

If you’re interested, please email residency@darklang.com with your LinkedIn or resume, and some information about what you’ll be working on. We’ll reply to everyone, and if we think it might work we’ll have you come in and see a demo!

¹ Curious about what’s been built before?

Daniel built Dabbleshelf as an EIR at Dark:

  • Integrated with his existing Dabblefox custodial products, including the data he’d stored in MongoDB.
  • While he built, we learned to support customers-of-our-customers for the first time and found and fixed a million bugs :)
  • Played with Dark for side projects
  • His take on Dark: “[Dark] makes it very easy to have very contained things: lots of distinct endpoints, easy to find out what each one does, and pretty quick to set up each endpoint.”

Chase built Altitude as an EIR at Dark:

  • Integrated with external APIs for Mailgun and Stripe.
  • Extensively used the queuing and cron functionality with Dark.
  • Launched from beta to public availability, with paying customers.
  • His take: “Dark is good for bootstrappers who need an API or a backend that’s reliable, but don’t want to deal with their logistics.”