Given the direction of AltSql, BareProxy, Precomputing and the VPN primitives work, there is still a surprisingly large design space for projects that are smaller than platforms but more fundamental than ordinary applications. The best candidates have a very simple sentence behind them: “X currently requires a framework, service or stack; this does the essential 10% in one tiny binary, library or file.”

Look for primitives that can begin as a credible 2,000–10,000-line Go project, have an immediately understandable demo, and later sit underneath commercial products rather than needing to become a SaaS business immediately. Here are twenty directions that fit that model.

Most sites run a thin slice of nginx in front of their application: TLS termination, serving static files from a folder, a couple of routes to a backend service, health checks, and the occasional reload. The configuration grows anyway, one regular expression at a time, until nobody is quite sure which block handles a given URL, and a change that looks safe to one person breaks something in production that another person didn’t know existed.