How do you grow a tool for developers?
I'm curious what have people done before to grow a product that is free and could be useful for developers? (https://waterdeep.io/)
Wondering what would be a few things to try, I'm thinking:
- Writing blog posts about coding (Content marketing) and create a mailing list.
- Creating and helping maintain an open source libraries
- Coding tutorials on Youtube
I think all coders end up with text files full of snippets. For me, for a tool to be effective, it would be very fast to bring up, faster than a browser (electron?), and it should be a flat scratch file where I can add one snippet after the other without having to create them as files. If there was syntax highlighting on this mess, it would be very interesting.
Also forgot to mention, there is syntax highlighting, the current supported languages are:
C
C++
Javascript
Bash
Clojure
Coffeescript
Csharp
CSS
Dart
Elixir
Elm
Erlang
Fsharp
Go
Haml
Java
Json
JSX
Kotlin
Lisp
Lua
Markdown
Matlab
Nginx
Objective-C
Perl
Php
Python
R
Ruby
Rust
Sass
Scala
Scss
Swift
Typescript
Yaml
You have to name the file with the right extension and highlighting works!
That's interesting, somebody else mentioned electron as well so most likely I'll work on that soon, can you elaborate on that, is it because desktop apps are faster to bring up than opening a website on a browser? kind of like slack or evernote desktop apps?
The reason I said electron is because for it to be useful, it would have to be running in the background, be connected to a global shortcut and pop up in the screen very quickly. Something like win+shift+s brings it up immediately.
For example, for me, you would be competing with scratch buffers in IntelliJ. I press shift three times, type "scr" and enter and I have a new pad to dump stuff in. That's much quicker than even finding my browser.
This is an interesting concept. Long ago I made an app for storing and searching through C# extension methods that I created/found online.
The tool that I used eventually just ended up getting converted to github repos and gists, since that's where the rest of my code was anyway.
Your project, however, seems cooler than that because it's actually geared toward shell scripts. In theory, you could store your scripts remotely and then execute them by piping them with a curl command. I think this is a really cool idea.
I might recommend to not only target developers, but see if you can find a sys-admin or devops community to show this off to.
I think showing some real world examples (maybe with gifs or videos) of how it's helpful could also help sell it.
wow that's actually a great idea, to target and start talking to sys admin and devops engineers since script running is sort of their day to day, thanks for this!
@yasu ...I love this - the interface is really simple to use - the registration process is very quick- the product itself is very useful. I signed up ( bis4tips)
Tips: