I am a huge fan of Observable and I think it has massive potential beyond visualizations. To me it's the holy grail of a development environment, there is no separation between development and output. There is no toolchain separating source and binary, infact, the binary is partially recomputed on changes.

On top, it is forkable for others to build upon. It support comments, its reactive. When I explain it to people I say its like a combination excel + vscode + google docs + github. There is nothing like it!

I been trying to see how far I can push it for non- visualization software. Turns out... pretty far....

Firebase + Stripe => https://observablehq.com/embed/@tomlarkworthy/saas-tutorial

On Demand Minecraft Servers => https://observablehq.com/@tomlarkworthy/minecraft-servers

Zero deploy serverless cells => https://observablehq.com/@tomlarkworthy/serverside-cells

With serverless cells I can serve HTTP endpoints from a notebook! E.g. custom HTML like:

https://serversidecells-ibyw6dtm4q-ey.a.run.app/notebooks/@t... is generated from a notebook!

I am so productive in Observable because there is no context switch between development, using the product and debugging, it's all just one thing. Amazing, utterly amazing. I hope the Observable team can accommodate my use cases, as its clearly not what they had in mind.