.NET Ketchup

After many months of tweaking and improving the web spider and observing consistently well indexed content and after having built a simple web frontend with the help of Tailwind CSS I decided it was time to launch.

https://dotnetketchup.com went live and I advertised my side project on ProductHunt and Hacker News but unfortunately without making front page news.

However, the good thing about having built a product which satisfies your own personal needs is that regardless of commercial success it is still a fun and useful project to have!

Since the public launch I have made further improvements to the spider, added extra filtering features to the web app and worked on growing a small but steady presence on Twitter.

The project plan was straightforward. First I needed to build a web spider (bot, crawler or however you like to call it) which would automatically search the internet for relevant and popular .NET content, then collect it, index it in a database and periodically check for updates.

I started to build the web spider first and mainly focused on searching relevant blog content and Twitter feeds. My goal was to have an early MVP ready before the new year so I could launch it in the background and start observing the results for a few months before going public.

On December 27th I deployed version 1 of the spider as a Google Cloud Function and have been monitoring the indexed results for many weeks since then. It took me quite a lot of iterations to enhance my spider in all sorts of ways so it would start picking up actual good content and skip everything else.

On November 5th I decided I will come up with a name and then start working on this project as a mean of killing some time and having fun during the pandemic.

My requirements for the name were dead simple:

• Must have a free domain
• Must be memorable
• Should be fun

Initially I thought I would call my new project ".NET Catch-up", but then I didn't like that "Catch-up" had no uniform way of spelling and I also found it to be a bit boring. I didn't want people to wonder if it's spelled ".NET Catchup", ".NET Catch-up" or ".NET Catch Up" and so on.

Later I thought what if I call it ".NET Ketchup" instead? It's a fun word play on "Catch-up" but also easy to remember and less ambiguous when it comes to spelling. The domain was free and on top of that I thought this would also help me to quickly settle on a colour scheme and branding. What a good excuse to simply take the official .NET branding and turn all the purple into red.

Domain registered, GitHub project started, Naming job done.

During the third lockdown of 2020 I got tired of social media and the effects it had on me. I felt I was constantly being exposed to negative press and a toxic environment which had a negative impact on my mental wellbeing.

However, not long after I took a break from Twitter (and other social media) I discovered that I was missing out on a lot of relevant news around the development of .NET and other topical content which I normally enjoyed reading as a software developer.

At this point I thought that it would be cool if there was an automated service which could crawl social media (and other places on the internet) to find the most relevant content around .NET and compile it into a beautiful and distraction free weekly feed.

The idea of .NET Ketchup was born.