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I've built a tool to help me in code review. Should I turn it into a product?

Hi, IndieHackers!

I'm a full-time software developer from Warsaw. During my work I've noticed a pattern: making a review of refactored code is hard, because a lot of code is moved from one place to another and the reviewer has a hard time noticing important differences. There are some operations that are very easy from a coder perspective which are hard for reviewers. Example: as a coder you found a useful function and want to use it, but in order to do that you have to move to a new location and adapt it a little bit for example add a new param. From your perspective this is a very small change - you just added parameter to an existing function. But the reviewer needs to read the whole moved function carefully to find differences.

Finally I have decided to do something about it. I wrote a browser extension ReviewRaccoon which reads changed code tries to find similarities between removed and added lines. I've been using this for more than a year now and I find it very useful. I shared this extension with my teammates and they like it as well.

So what's the problem?

I see two:

  1. Big code refactors are not that common (problematic review might be one of the reasons). So there were situations in which I thought "Wow, this extension just saved me an hour of work", but that is not that common. I would estimate it as 1-2 times a month. Other times it's more like a save 1 minute here and 2 minutes there. I'm not sure if that is enough value for clients so that they will be willing to pay for it.
  2. I'm a backend software developer so I know almost nothing about marketing, business channels and acquiring clients. Where do you think is a good place to find clients? The only place I can think of is:
    https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/
    but I feel like I should focus on reaching out to software developers. Any ideas are welcomed.

If you want to see how it works you can go extension page to see some screenshots, but encourage you to try it yourself.
Got to my example pull request page and try to find differences:
https://github.com/albrycht/ReviewRaccoon/pull/8/files
Then install extension and do it once again (page refresh probably will be required)
For Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reviewraccoon/bodhfgomhaojlhecnhhjfeoadfifmeed
For Firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reviewraccoon/

I will be grateful for any comments!

on November 19, 2020