The App Plumber: Parse’s Ilya Sukhar

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 challenge—and 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 rivals