Stypi

» see code.stypi.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Etherpad was sold to Google in December 2009, folded into Google Wave, and open-sourced on the way out the door. Stypi was two people deciding, a year and a half later, to write the thing again anyway. Jason Chen and Byron Milligan came out of Y Combinator in August 2011 with a real-time collaborative text editor, and TechCrunch's headline on the 9th called it Etherpad reborn. The founders did not argue with that.

The product was deliberately small. You opened a document, you sent somebody the URL, and they were in it. There was no permissions system to configure and no account required of the person you invited, which in 2011 was unusual enough to be the entire pitch. Everyone's edits appeared as they were typed. A chat column ran down the right side, and the editor did syntax highlighting, which is why it ended up being used for remote coding interviews as much as for writing.

The best thing in it was playback. Any document could be replayed from empty to finished, one character at a time, in the order the characters had been typed.

~ the case file ~

~ the exit ~

Salesforce announced the acquisition on 1 May 2012, twelve months after launch, terms undisclosed. The founders' statement said Stypi would remain live and that users would keep their access.

That promise held for three years. The editor kept running at code.stypi.com with its eight-character document IDs while Chen and Milligan worked on real-time collaboration inside Salesforce. The front door is the part that went first: stypi.com served its own site until 30 May 2013 and then started redirecting away, which is why anyone looking for the corpse at the obvious address now lands on Salesforce marketing instead of an editor.

~ the deletion notice ~

The farewell was one paragraph and most of it was a deadline. "As of September 3, 2015, the stypi.com website will no longer be available. We have created an export tool, so you can download an archive of all of your Stypi documents anytime between now and September 3 at 8:00pm PT." Then the part that mattered: anything not downloaded into an archive by that hour would be deleted.

Archive Team's record of the shutdown marks the content as lost. A pad like this holds the material nobody files anywhere, a shared scratch buffer during a phone call or the thinking-out-loud half of an interview, and the export window was about four weeks wide.

~ what i used instead ~

I was writing code through the whole of Stypi's life and I never once typed its address. The job it did got done for me by a pastebin link dropped into a chat window, and later by a gist. Neither of those could show two cursors moving at the same time, and both of them were already open. Stypi solved a want that only gets sharp once your team is remote, and mine was down the hall.

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