Hello, Membrane

2024-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

It’s been a busy, exciting past few months. I joined membrane.io as an intern in September, and I’m having a great time making improvements to the platform and building things in user space.

What’s Membrane?

Membrane is a serverless platform for developing JavaScript/TypeScript programs.

Every program you create in your Membrane workspace becomes part of your graph, and the programs can connect to each other through this graph.

There are a few key things that set Membrane apart from other serverless platforms:

Programs have built-in state - no need to set up a database
Everything gets logged before it happens - if it’s not in the logs, it didn’t happen
Each program gets an email address - handle incoming emails by exporting an email function
Each program gets its own endpoint - handle HTTP requests by exporting an endpoint function
Programs can use other programs as building blocks through graph connections

What I’ve Been Working On.

Most of my time has been spent on Membrane’s API drivers. Drivers let you interact with external APIs through Membrane’s graph.

I’ve been improving existing drivers like Discord and Anthropic and building a tool to generate new ones. The more drivers on Membrane, the more useful tools and automations we can build!

A driver exposes API endpoints as nodes (fields, actions, events) that you can reference in your graph with a simple syntax.

For example, github:users.one(name:"membrane-io") tells Membrane to get a specific GitHub user - but here’s what’s cool: even though that API call returns all of the user’s data, you can selectively reference just the pieces you need in other programs, like if we want to get their avatar: github:users.one(name:"membrane-io").avatar_url.

Other Projects and Improvements:

Implemented type inference for Membrane state
Dynamic OG images for the changelog, packages, and docs
Made a driver for the Membrane API: mem

I’m excited to start building more drivers and example tools/automations :).

If you’d like to learn more about Membrane check these out:

And join the Discord!

Want to Help Shape Membrane?

We’re looking for developers to try out Membrane and share their feedback!

If you’re interested in participating in user interviews, reach out to me at thomas@membrane.io. We’d love to hear your thoughts and help you get started building tools for yourself or for your company.

membrane javascript

Thomas Seeley

@tseeley.com on Bluesky, @iamseeley on Mastodon

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Thomas Seeley - javascript

Hello, Membrane

What’s Membrane?

What I’ve Been Working On.

Want to Help Shape Membrane?