Pagedraw

» see pagedraw.io as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Pagedraw was a compiler with a drawing program bolted to the front. You laid out a screen the way you would in a design tool, and it emitted React components that you checked into your own repository. The output was code you owned rather than a hosted page or a one-way export. Jared Pochtar and Gabriel Guimaraes started on it in 2016 and took it through Y Combinator's winter 2018 batch.

The public launch was a Launch HN post on 26 February 2018 that reached 344 points, carrying named endorsements from Nick Schrock, who co-created GraphQL, and Pete Hunt from the early React team. TechCrunch wrote it up two days later. For a tool in a category littered with abandoned attempts, that was about as good an opening as the category allowed.

Eleven months later the founders shut it down and published their reasoning. The reasoning is what survived.

~ the case file ~

~ the letter ~

The notice went up on 22 January 2019 and it opens the way these pages always open, thanking users and investors. Then it turns. "Ultimately, we think Pagedraw is the wrong product. We think you can get 90% of the benefits of Pagedraw by just using JSX better. Our findings on this will be controversial, as they go entirely against the current 'best practices,' so we'll save them for a later blog post." The promised post never appeared.

React front ends have never been my work. My code runs on drones and on the hardware underneath them, so a generator for view components was always somebody else's problem to have. The claim is still legible from over here. Two founders spent three years inside the hardest version of a problem, came out believing the answer was to write the code better rather than generate it, and then said so on their own homepage instead of letting the site go quiet. The usual version of this page gives a date and thanks you for your support.

~ the second submission ~

The shutdown page was posted to Hacker News within hours of going up and it got four points. Five weeks later, on 28 February 2019, somebody resubmitted the same unchanged URL and it reached 343 points and the front page. That second run is where most people read it, and it is the date this grave sat under in the queue until today.

The real moment is pinned by four timestamps inside a few hours of 22 January. The repository's first public commit lands at 02:30 UTC, a GitHub release tagged 1.0 and labeled "Open Source release" at 05:11, the first Hacker News submission at 06:32, and the earliest archived capture of the notice at 06:47. Late evening of 21 January in San Francisco, in other words, and the queue was off by thirty-seven days.

~ still answering ~

Seven years on, pagedraw.io is still up and still serving that notice, under a title tag nobody ever changed from "Pagedraw, effortlessly turn mockups into functional UI code." The app subdomain stopped resolving long ago. The repository sits on GitHub under MIT with 3,556 stars and a README reading "Pagedraw is not currently under development. We do not recommend using it for production. Please fork and use it for something cool!", and the last commit of any kind was a stranger fixing a typo on Christmas Day 2020.

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