Hello! A small community and I are building Apptron, the first and only browser-based polyglot development environment. It's a malleable, local-first IDE that allows developers to instantly start coding with any software stack in the browser with no setup, making it ideal for rapid development onboarding, collaboration, and experimentation.

Build and run any software in the browser without the hassle or security risks of setting up local environments, and without the latency or cost of cloud-based IDEs.

Thanks to GitHub Sponsors, years of R&D have gone into the technical innovations of Apptron making it the most advanced yet elegant solution in this space, and it's available to you free and open source as both hosted and self-hosted software.

Built with Wanix

Apptron is powered by Wanix, a micro operating system inspired by the successor to Unix known as Plan 9 from Bell Labs. Wanix is an embeddable runtime that uses WebAssembly and emulation to run software in the browser that was not possible before. This enables:

• Nearly any toolchain to run entirely within the browser
• Full compute and dev environments in your web app
• Running backends in the frontend, regardless of language
• Limited ability to run Docker containers in the browser

Built for much more

Apptron and Wanix are part of a much larger R&D effort of mine called Tractor that could only be done with this kind of sponsorship. The Apptron roadmap is about rolling these Tractor technologies into Apptron, making it into a sort of stem cell of software. This roadmap is currently only available to and influenced by sponsors.

Tractor Stack

The following are some of the open source technologies that make up the Tractor stack:

• Apptron - Universal, malleable IDE
• Wanix - Plan 9 inspired micro operating system for web and beyond
• Treehouse - Tana/Notion inspired "information interface"
• Manifold - Runtime for modular software construction
• Tractor Toolkit - Library of basic primitives and abstractions

Towards Tractor Studio

Apptron is a prototype for a high-level software construction kit and design tool that builds on, and encodes, my accumulated experience and expertise in software design, aiming for a world where building software is closer to how I imagined it would be before I learned the reality. Tractor Studio would grant you the leverage to quickly "throw together" any software system you can imagine as easily as playing with Legos.

About me

I'm Jeff Lindsay. I've somehow remained at the forefront of cloud and developer tooling for the last 20 years. Now, with your help, I'm building the ideal software platform.

• Coined and evangelized webhooks
• Helped start the Docker project
• Worked at NASA Ames on what became OpenStack
• Early engineer and helped start the platform team at Twilio
• Built Dokku and many PaaS/Docker primitives (logspout, registrator, alpine)
• Invented localtunnel, the inspiration for Ngrok and other copycats
• Started SuperHappyDevHouse legendary Silicon Valley hackathons
• Co-founded Hacker Dojo technology community center and hackerspace
• Also makes indie games and music, and was EP for Indie Game: The Movie

What sponsorship does

Your sponsorship will allow me to build Apptron and Tractor without compromise or premature commercialization. This kind of independent research and development is slow, costly, and stressful. I will be deeply grateful for your patronage.

Thank you! ✌️💀