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Launched productivity tool for developers Fill.ly - feedback welcomed

Hi everyone, it’s my first post here.

A couple of months ago I launched a tool that was used only by me when developing a few web apps. For some time I’ve been rebuilding it with features to support IT teams and companies.

The idea is simple - when you develop you have to click a lot on your app. Mostly you are filling out something randomly / semi-randomly. Eg. you develop registration form - you first check JS/html validation, then check if backend works. You probably have to check it multiple times before it all works well (saving to DB, displaying some notifs, sending an email, generating some account data in DB etc). During this process, you are filling in the username and other fields many times.
Of course, some of these things may be checked by automated tests. But even if your test coverage is high you still have to do a lot of things manually. This is where Filly comes in. It’s a Chrome extension that fills out different forms on websites with one hotkey. It literally takes less than one second to fill out a huge webpage form.

That was the beginning. And now... a few months later I feel a lot of work can be shared even more. To draw you a picture other developers in your project also need to test the same pages.. why not to add a possibility to share data for the whole team?

Further.. if I create sets of data for my local app it would be useful to have those sets on other instances of the app - stage or production, right?

So, these are the features I’m still working on. I’ve never seen such a tool before. Yes, it’s a kind of autocomplete but improved - with sharing options. Sharing between team members or between apps on different domains - yourapp[dot]localhost can have the same inputs as yourapp[dot]com. It’s way more handy than regular autocomplete. Ouch, and browser autocomplete works only on personal data and with Filly you can store anything.

My personal observations show I’m saving up to 10 minutes every hour (a dozen of hours per month), depending on the app I’m working on (how many automated tests it has). Giving me several extra hours per month.

Any feedback on the tool and the landing page (there is a lot of room for improvement I guess) is warmly welcomed!

https://fill.ly
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/filly/imemmdpjflmkjjomahchpaijgfhnpdmp
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJmmp8GmOdU

on September 19, 2019
  1. 1

    What about Firefox? I don't really like using Chrome...

    1. 1

      Good news is that I had Firefox version and it was working well, bad is, it required a lot of time to maintain both of them. Unfortunately until I got some serious number of users I will focus only on Chrome version.

  2. 1

    This comment was deleted 7 years ago

    1. 2

      There are to options:

      • you can use Filly just as an extension without online service. Then your data are stored in a sandboxed place in Chrome where only the extension has access
      • you can use it all together with online service. We store everything on Vultr hosting which is proven and secure. All communication goes through https.

      Also, I feel you may think that it gathers all the input in your forms automatically. No :) User decides what to save by clicking "Save current form". When it comes to sharing on domains and sharing with team it works (or WILL work in case of team sharing, as this is still developed) on specified company domains. You type all the domains that are for developers eg. awesomesaas[dot]local, stage.awesomesaas[dot].com, app.wesomesaas[dot]io and only on these domains team-mates see your forms, and you see their forms.

      Also, we don't allow for storing password - this field is not supported by our app so it will be ommited when filling or saving. There are better tools for it (LastPass) and I don't want to go into the direction of having everything in the app.

      I prefer people use it for super quick filling forms with random / semi-random than using it also as some kind of password manager.