RepoStory

After lots of fiddling with RepoStory I've decided that it's time to start getting broader feedback and so I'm making it more public and creating this page!

Do I think it's good enough? Nope. Not even close.

But I realized that getting it to "good enough" is potentially a multi-month endeavor, and I don't want to be heads down building something for the next few months without getting any feedback on it.

The more I work on the project the more excited and discouraged I'm getting at the same time. Excited because it's fun and I see an infinite number of ways I could improve it. Discouraged because I'm so far away from something I think is actually good enough to potentially attract users and (maybe one day) paying customers.

But - I'm not going to get the right feedback and/or encouragement by working in private, so it's time to start getting this thing out in the world!

True to my goals for the hackathon week - I shipped the first public version of RepoStory on Friday, 4 days after breaking ground on the project.

But I didn't think the product was good enough so I didn't publicly announce it. I just shared the app in a few private channels.

I got some great feedback, but also realized I had a long way to go before it would be really useful.

It started with a simple plan: I'd take a week off from normal work to build a new side project.

The project that I decided to try was an idea I’ve been noodling on for more than 3 years: analytics for teams building software. Specifically, leveraging all the data around how people code - commits, pull requests, reviews, etc. - to say something about a software project and team that you can’t say from the code itself.

It sounded like fun, felt like the right size for a one-week hackathon, and I thought maybe had some monetization potential. And with that I was off to the races!