12 Projects in 6 Months from Postlight Labs

When the teams here at Postlight aren’t building software for our clients, we’re building software for ourselves. To stay sharp and build proficiency in the latest and greatest tech, we stood up Postlight Labs: Our workshop for building playful experiments and forward-looking products using modern platforms.

We’ve been heads-down experimenting and building this year, and we’re thrilled to share what we’ve come up with to the world. In the past 6 months, we’ve released or updated a dozen Labs projects. They’re all free and available to try, download, and experiment with now.

Check them out.

Tinysheet

The world’s tiniest spreadsheet has only as many rows, columns, and functions as you need, and it’s easy to use on mobile touchscreen keyboards. Use it to split the bill, tally up profits, or jot a back of envelope for your next big business idea. Add it to your phone’s homescreen now.

Dash for Slack

Sometimes you just need the room. Dash for Slack makes it easy to quickly gather people across your Slack workspace into a temporary channel, set a deadline, and get things done. Dash is a slash command for Slack that creates channels with expiration dates for groups to have time-boxed discussions. Add it to your Slack workspace.

RFP Builder

The boss handed you a mandate: Find a qualified vendor to design and build your organization’s next digital product. The first step is to issue a Request for Proposal. Where to start? RFP Builder walks you through the process step-by-step, dynamically updating based on your needs. When you’re done, get the document as an editable Microsoft Word file.

Fyre Ipsum

Sometimes product designers need filler text for their mockups. Conventional lorem ipsum is boring and predictable. Why not use real, actual hyped-up nonsense to fill those boxes? Fyre Ipsum is a lorem ipsum generator based on the Fyre Festival pitch deck. Fyred out? Create your own lorem ipsum generator, based on any content on the web.

Glide: Salesforce GraphQL

Glide is a JavaScript library for engineers who are building Salesforce integrations into their apps. Glide provides access to Salesforce via a GraphQL API to make development faster and easier. Glide automatically introspects your Salesforce data models, creating an intuitive GraphQL schema out of the box. Glide also handles Salesforce authentication for you, so you can hit the ground running and start prototyping right away. Get started with Glide.

Liftoff: Airtable CMS

Static websites are quick to build and cheap to host, but they usually require technical expertise to update the content on them. Airtable is a beloved, hybrid spreadsheet/database product that offers a fantastic API. What if you could easily create a static website using content in your Airtable base, and be able to update that content without touching a line of code? Meet Liftoff, a static site generator that does just that. If you know how to fill out a spreadsheet, you’re 90% of the way to creating your own website with Liftoff.

Node.js + TypeScript Starter Kit

One of the most time-consuming and tedious parts of starting a new JavaScript project is just getting set up. Postlight’s Node.js + TypeScript Starter Kit saves you the trouble. This free, modern boilerplate fast-tracks JavaScript engineers through project setup directly to the task they want to do most: writing code.

Cloudflare Worker App Kit

Sometimes static files don’t cut it, but deploying a server and database can be too much if your app just needs a few simple features. Cloudflare Workers cover that middle ground between a full-featured server and a static client. To make it easier for developers to try Cloudflare Workers, we created The Cloudflare Worker App Kit, a handy set of tools for creating, developing, testing, and deploying a Cloudflare Worker app.

React Google Sheet to Chart

As a user, it’s easy to make charts inside Google Sheets. As a developer, you’ve got to learn a plotting library to include charts in your React-powered webapp.

Save the time and effort: Postlight’s React component, Google Sheet to Chart enables engineers to embed gorgeous, customizable charts inside their React apps with minimal configuration.

Mercury

Mercury is a complete web-parsing toolkit that transforms web pages into clean text. Now that Mercury Parser is open source, you can make it even better–for everyone. If Mercury does a less-than-perfect job parsing an article from your favorite web site, write and submit a custom site parser guaranteed to get it right quickly, every time.

WordPress + React Starter Kit

People who publish on the web love WordPress. Engineers love React. With some research, configuration, and trial and error, you can have both — but we’d like to save you the work. Postlight’s WordPress + React Starter Kit is a free, zero-to-hero toolkit for engineers and product tinkerers who want to try out headless WordPress on their own computer with minimal effort.

New in version 2.0:

• All-new GraphQL-powered React frontend
• User authentication with JWT
• One-step startup using Docker containers that work everywhere
• Better developer tools, including continuous integration and improved code linting

Modern Serverless Starter Kit

Postlight’s Modern Serverless Starter Kit adds a light layer on top of the Serverless framework, including the latest in modern JavaScript tooling, handy helper functions, and easy deploy commands to AWS Lambda staging and production environments.

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As you can see, a lot of the tools we made are tools for makers, so we want to know what you build with them: Get in touch at hello@postlight.com and thanks for checking them out.

Gina Trapani is a Managing Partner at Postlight who helps shepherd Labs projects into existence. Send her a note: gina.trapani@postlight.com.