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Slapdash (YC W19) - Remote - https://slapdash.com/

We have built a low-latency file system for your cloud application as well as the fastest interface in the world - the Command Bar - to interact with it. It's a new type of type of tool that makes modern computer work less tedious and more fun.

We are hiring for three engineering roles:

  * Infrastructure Engineer - build infra that turns cloud apps into a low-latency database
  * Product Engineer - build brand new ways for people to get things done with a focus on speed
  * Partner Engineer - build integrations and custom commands to make our partners successful

We have an incredible development stack, all in Typescript, that lets us move incredibly fast. A small, but incredible team of very talented engineers. And, the product we're building is also something we all love and use.


Slapdash (YC19) - https://slapdash.com - Full-time, Remote

At Slapdash, we are building a uniform, low-latency interface to your cloud applications. Think a Spotlight-style command line for your working world.

You can read more about what are building here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24364811

We have a great technology stack with an emphasis on speed and dev experience (heavy on Typescript).

We are currently in need of a lead product designer as well as a product-focused engineer. If you're curious to bend the physics of what's possible with cloud applications and want to be at the vanguard of HCI, please reach out!

Lead Product Designer: https://jobs.lever.co/slapdash/fc5fe8fb-ed8c-4342-91b6-53fd5...

Senior Software Engineer (Product): https://jobs.lever.co/slapdash/ade169fc-69cb-4516-b501-1c5c8...


OK, we put the finishing touches on the Linux client and it's now available for download.

We still have some fit & finish things to improve upon, but it should be quite functional.

We are new to this, so don't hesitate to reach out with suggestions, we're still learning.


That's a really neat idea to be able to search logs quickly.

We definitely support building custom commands, but they are super limited today. We have to build the sophisticated commands ourselves. However, we will be opening up our toolkit, so if you have ideas on dev ex of building a command or how you would want to rig them up, feel free to reach out.

Feel free to shoot me an email (ivan@) if you want to brainstorm some commands and how they can work.


Cool, thanks for the reports. Will fix.


What do you mean by local installation?

Certain products have a desktop app counterpart. For example, Notion, Trello, Figma, etc.

Slapdash is aware of those applications and when possible will opt to open things inside the desktop app vs a browser tab.


We don't take security lightly, but we don't do a good job articulating how we safeguard things in the product. We'll fix this - thanks for pushing on it.

There are details throughout this post, but I will summarize our high-level approach.

* When we request permissions, we request a minimal set. For example, you can connect Drive with just meta-data access and our access will be scoped accordingly.

* Everything is encrypted. Importantly, it's also encrypted in the data store itself. If our DB was compromised, the entries would not be readable (ECIES, Secp256k1, AES256+CTR). Only exception is the reverse index.

* The operations that involve encryption / decryption of encrypted content live in an isolated layer.

* Token storage follows similar methodology

* We get a pentest and security reviews quarterly

* We also have strict company policies around IT and infrastructure access

That said, we aren't ever at a terminal point in our security story.

Our experience has been that security conscious companies simply turn off ability to connect third party applications.


How do guys afford quarterly pen-tests as a start up?


We are lucky to be a funded company with 5 people and couple of years of runway.

A pen test costs half the monthly salary of an engineer, so it’s an easy investment to rationalize on a quarterly basis.


The reason some apps are not removed after you connect them is that you can connect more than one account. For example, you can connect multiple G-Drive accounts.

That said, it's definitely confusing in its current form, so thanks for highlighting it.

The apps you suggested are definitely within reach (except for maybe Signal). We don't integrate any CMS's yet, but I think it would be quite helpful, especially for folks who tend to interface with them a lot.


Yes, it's almost ready.

You can actually download a linux build from: https://download.slapdash.com/

The one thing we have left is fixing auth. We auth in the browser and then open the desktop app to pass the auth tokens to the desktop client. However, this hand off is more difficult to achieve with Linux (can't just open slapdash:// URLs as easily as you can on OS X and windows).

There is a work around hack, where if you can get the auth token from the browser and manually add it to Slapdash.

The steps are: Open Chrome Dev Tool Console right inside the desktop app (F12 or Shift+Ctrl+I) and run something like:

location.hash = "#/lt?token=..."

We will of course build a more person-friendly UX before we make the linux client more widely available.


> However, this hand off is more difficult to achieve with Linux (can't just open slapdash:// URLs as easily as you can on OS X and windows).

Isn't this exactly what xdg-open does?

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xdg-utils

https://askubuntu.com/questions/527166/how-to-set-subl-proto...

I suppose if you want to support text mode (ie use from mutt without running a gui) - you'd have to use mailcap - but that assumes the login flow works in a text mode browser like w3m...


Thanks for Linux support.

I am no expert, but as far as my experience goes, an app registers a URI scheme with the system, and then it is as easy as 'xdg-open scheme://stuff's life e12e said.


Both Slapdash and Command E can search apps, but Slapdash can do other things too:

* You can also write to applications, it's not just read-only (create docs, file issues, close tasks, upload files, etc.)

* You can browse the structure of applications in Slapdash (not just search them).

* You can build sophisticated queries (show all tasks open tasks, that mention this customer, render it as a list)

* We are client-agnostic. While we love our desktop client, you can also use Slapdash just in a browser window, or as a Chrome extension (and soon mobile).

* You can control your desktop computer too (launch apps, search local files, etc.)

* You can build your own custom commands and share them with others (this turns out to be quite fun)


That's really cool!

What's the process around adding new apps? Would one be able to integrate easily?

I built Quest https://github.com/hverlin/Quest during the lockdown to search content across several apps (Gmail, Jira, Confluence...) as I could not find one that would allow me to do this.


Quest looks cool. I just downloaded and started playing with it - well done.

Today, we write the integrations ourselves.

We will eventually open up our APIs so people can build their own integrations to extend Slapdash. If you have ideas or thoughts on what would be a good dev experience, feel free to reach out.


Awesome. Thanks for breaking it down.


Thanks, this is helpful! Can you do a similar pros/cons comparison with Akiflow?


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