Forms for demanding applications

The FormWork mission statement

Or: why something that sounds obvious took us ages to get right.

We believe every company should have a purpose — a reason to exist — and that understanding this purpose helps shape its ethos, vision, and direction. This is often wrapped up in something called a mission statement.

A good mission statement should be short, simple, and easy to remember. Counter-intuitively, the more foundational or even obvious it sounds, the more useful it can be.

We spent a long time trying to define ours. Not because we didn’t know what we wanted to build, but because getting down to the heart of the matter — to its most basic concept — is not as easy as it sounds. Engineers, after all, are far better at adding words than removing them.

Eventually, we ended up with this:

Forms for demanding applications

It sounds underwhelming. We know.
But it does far more work than it first appears to.

That single line now helps guide our decisions about what we build, how we build it, and just as importantly, what we choose not to build.

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Forms

FormWork is not about fancy display tables, dashboards, or graphs. Plenty of tools already do those things very well. For some applications, the focus is how data is displayed. For others, it’s about connecting to a bijillion third-party services.

For us, it’s the form.

The form is the point where data is created. It’s where errors are introduced or prevented. It’s where complexity either leaks out to users or is handled properly by the system.

In fact, we believe in the form so strongly that almost everything in FormWork is built on it. The forms people fill in, the team fields your staff use internally and the data tables behind your dropdowns all share the same form engine, and automations use the same conditions, calculations and references. That repetition is deliberate. It allows us to reuse the same logic in multiple places, rather than reinventing it each time.

If something doesn’t make forms better, more robust, or more capable, it probably doesn’t belong in the platform.

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Demanding

FormWork was not designed for simple forms — although it can do them. Using it for a basic contact form is a bit like hunting with a rocket launcher. It will work, but it’s probably overkill.

If all you need is a simple “name, email, message” form, there are cheaper tools out there. We won’t pretend otherwise. We’ll even recommend them.

Where FormWork shines is in forms that are hard to do.

Importantly, demanding does not mean long or complex. A form can be demanding without being either. It might need to handle a million submissions an hour. It might need to integrate with a deeply unpleasant proprietary API. It might need strict validation, auditability, or guarantees around reliability and performance.

By deliberately focusing on demanding use cases, we’ve built a platform that supports edge cases without becoming painful to use.

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Applications

This is the sneaky word in the statement.

Depending on your background, you’ll read it differently. If you’re more process-focused, you might think about how something is applied. If you’re a developer, you’ll probably read it as an application platform.

We mean both.

FormWork exists because we needed a tool that could be applied where nothing else quite worked. We didn’t start with a grand vision. We started with a problem and a growing pile of workarounds that were all worse than just building the thing properly.

At the same time, we know FormWork doesn’t exist in isolation. You’re collecting data for a reason. You need to move it, process it, and integrate it with other systems. That’s why FormWork has been designed to be easy to integrate into a wider application ecosystem.

We tried other words here — projects, solutions, plans, uses. None of them quite captured what we were trying to build. Applications stuck, slightly awkwardly, which usually means it’s the right choice.

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A guiding light

Our mission statement won’t answer every question. It won’t tell us which coffee to buy for the office, or finally settle whether chairs are better than tables.

But it does give us a reference point.

When we’re unsure which way to go, we come back to it:

• Does this make forms better?
• Does it support demanding use cases?
• Does it belong in serious applications?

If the answer is no, we’re probably heading in the wrong direction.

So yes, we may politely decline your request to render a fully interactive map of all your users’ favourite trees. But the platform is extensible, the APIs are there, and if you really want it, you’re free to build it yourself.

And that, slightly round-about as it may be, is the point.

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FormWork

Forms for demanding applications

— Simon & Andrius