The App Plumber: Parse's Ilya Sukhar

How building the pipes that connect apps to the cloud makes life easier for developers.

ReadWriteBuilders is a series of interviews with developers, designers and other architects of the programmable future.

Coming up with an idea for a new app is often the easy part. Actually coding and debugging it is more of a challengeand then tying it into "backend" cloud services that offer storage, notifications and integration with social networks can just plain be a real slog.

Which is where services like Parse come in. The "backend as a service" startup, which Facebook acquired in April, aims to make it easy for developers to build great apps that run across multiple platforms such as iOS and Android.

In a sense, Parse and its rivalsserve as "app plumbers"they offer simple connections to the cloud's "pipes" that handle complex tasks many app developers would just as soon not have to figure out themselves. By doing so, they greatly simplify the task of making apps work on different platforms. That's no small task:Between the launch of smartwatches and theprospect of self-driving cars in the not-too-distant future, developers and companies are likely to face a proliferation of new platforms to build on.

I caught up with Ilya Sukhar, cofounder and CEO of Parse,at the company'sdeveloper day earlier this month.Sukhar, who's immersed in the fluid world of application development, predicts the next few years will be an exciting time for developers.

ReadWrite:What made you start Parse?

Ilya Sukhar:I was building these apps, and it was painful. It wasnt fun. I wasnt doing what I expected to be doing, I wasnt spending time on the stuff I was expecting to be spending time on and it dawned on me that something was wrong in the world.

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The App Plumber: Parse's Ilya Sukhar