Spellbook

Yesterday I received my first support ticket/request for Spellbook. Some may not consider this much of a milestone, but for me this was at once exhilirating (because it means that someone is actually using a product I built), and also kinda frightening (because it means that someone found a bug in a product I built and that I am trying to get them to pay for). Thankfully, the user provided some good information for me to begin investigating the problem. I immediately sent him an email back acknowledging that I was working his issue. It turned out to be a simple problem that didn't even involve changing any code in the plugin. I emailed my customer with the solution and got him up and running again using Spellbook in his IDE 👍🏽! He also gave me some wonderful feedback regarding how excited he is to use Spellbook and I let him know that there are some awesome things coming in the next version update 😀! I am definitely looking forward to continuing to work on this product!!!

I released my plugin Spellbook and the limited but always free Spellbook Basic to the JetBrains plugin repo a little over a week ago and I'm proud to report that between both I've reached 100+ downloads 😁! This is without any real marketing or "launching" on my part! Just people finding it in the plugin repo and being intrigued enough to install it in their IDE and try it out.

To be clear, most of these downloads are for the free 30 day trial I believe, so I'll need to wait a month or so to see if people stick with it for real validation, but seeing as how I built this thing to scratch my own itch, it feels good to see other people even at all curious about something I worked hard on. Anywho, just wanted to share this small feat with you guys.

Later 👊🏾

I released my plugin Spellbook in the JetBrains plugin repo last week and decided to try my first Product Hunt launch. I was a little apprehensive about posting the plugin on Product Hunt. I'm not sure such a product will really make much impact on such a broad platform given how niche my target audience currently is (developers that use JetBrains IDEs who also use Evernote). I'm working on the "nicheness" of Spellbook in the next release by adding additional note service integrations and possibly building for other IDEs (VS Code 🙏🏾). But until then, check me out on Product Hunt and drop some feedback. https://www.producthunt.com/posts/spellbook. I really appreciate it!

I just recently completed development of v1.0 of the plugin I've been working on for the past 2 months - Spellbook! I'm pretty excited to have finally finished initial development, not just because it's my first real product that I actually finished building, but also because I think it could be a really useful tool for developers.

I started building Spellbook simply to scratch my own itch. I've been using Evernote as basically a development knowledge repo for awhile now. I use Evernote to store code snippets, implementation notes, stack overflow screenshots, CL commands, you name it. I like to archive this information because I tend to refer back to it often when I'm doing development work. But I always have to leave my IDE and break my focus while I'm working to go to the browser and search for this information. Next thing you know, I'm on reddit, or dev.to, or indie hackers reading cool stuff instead of getting work done. I wanted an easy way to get at the info in my Evernote knowledge repo without having to leave my development environment....and Spellbook is born.

I didn't actually realize how much I really needed a tool like this until I started using an early alpha version of the plugin in Intellij. I can say that my productivity has definitely jumped using this plugin, as I'm spending less time in the browser and more time in my IDE getting work done.

Now that v1.0 development is complete, I'm working with the good folks over at JetBrains to get the plugin released in the new JetBrains Plugin Marketplace. I'm hoping to be able to officially release Spellbook in the next week or so.

So if you're a developer looking for a useful notes plugin for your JetBrains IDE, check out Spellbook - https://www.getspellbook.dev
If you're interested you can send me an email from the website or at getspellbook@gmail.com and when I launch, you'll get a discount!