The story of how Ably came to be

The author shares their passion for programming and how it led them to create Ably, a realtime messaging platform-as-a-service. They discuss the challenges they faced while developing realtime apps using Ruby on Rails and how Node.js emerged as a more suitable option due to its inherent asynchronous model. The author then highlights the shortcomings of existing realtime messaging services, which prompted them to create Ably with deterministic, highly available, stateful, consistent, and protocol-agnostic features. They acknowledge the challenges faced during development but emphasize that the immense complexity and investment made in their product have created significant barriers to entry for competitors. Today, Ably is officially production-ready, offering developers dependable realtime messaging and data stream capabilities.