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I wandered off and built an IDE

blog.querystorm.com

41–50 of 273 posts

Re: I wandered off and built an IDE

#41

My usual approach when I reach the limit of my excel skills (and patience) is to save as csv, write a Python script to do the job, import back in excel for the graphs. This looks like it could nicely streamline the process, granted I learn a bit of C# (any excuse to pick up a new language I guess). Looking forward to try the tool the next time I battle a budget forecasting file. And kudos for the well-written and fun…

This may sound weird but my go-to these days for text munging is actually PHP. Set it up as a shell script, do all your testing on the command line, and then if it's something you use a lot (or other people could use), throw it on a server somewhere with a web form at the front end to make it more accessible.

Not for anything serious, but great for those occasional quick-hack utilities to save you a bunch of cut-and-pasting or data reformatting.

Re: I wandered off and built an IDE

#42
“You might be surprised to learn that in a developer’s life, there aren’t all that many chances to impress girls with your coding skills.”

Ha ha. When my wife and I were new she asked to use my laptop and was surprised that it “had no icons”. (No window system). So I started to show her how to avoid using a GUI. 12 years later she uses a terminal about half of her time as a stock administrator.

Re: I wandered off and built an IDE

#43
In regards to your non-existent pricing page, I would suggest this read: https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/saas-pricing :) I think you could capture more B2B value if you display some amount of pricing for potential business customers and also make it more clear for non-commercial users that it is free.

Besides from that, product looks really nice!

Re: I wandered off and built an IDE

#44
post #33

I really like this guy's tenacity and clever use of excel. But from my experience you can use excel files as an ODBC database source (Windows). https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15844633/using-excel-as-... Once you create your ODBC source from the excel files, you can run queries and use the language of your choice (Python,C# ....). I am pretty sure you can also insert/update rows and columns too. Wondering how thi…

See the Dropbox HN argument.

Polish.

Re: I wandered off and built an IDE

#45
I loved that you used your technical skills to solve a real problem, besides regular stuff at corporate work :) Insipiring!

Sorry this could be a dumb question, but,does this plugin work with Spreadsheets in Google docs? If Yes, thats great, just from the perspective that it will add more customers for you. If not, are you planning to add support in google sheets as well?

Re: I wandered off and built an IDE

#46
post #37

This looks awesome! Have you thought about joining https://wip.chat Lots of fellow makers in there :)

Not the OP but... What's the upside of using wip.chat? It just seems to be a public to-do list system?

A community of people who get things done everyday. Seeing other people mark off their todos and launch their products all day and night is surprisingly insupiring.

The community is also very welcoming and helpful!

Re: I wandered off and built an IDE

#48
post #40

Congratulations on the project. It actually seems like something quite fun to build! I'd probably have kept it open source and just do it for fun, but good luck with the company nontheless! Personally I did not immediatly think about Jetbrains when reading this name, probably because I mostly use IntelliJ IDEA rather than PHPStorm.

Yeah, it was really fun to built! The parser, editor features and C# support were amazing to work on. Some times I felt like I was wasting time, but when I compare what I was working on most days in a corp to what I get to work on with QueryStorm, I'm pretty happy I did what I did. As for open source, that might be a better way to go. The project needs a community and open sourcing would help a lot. It's something fo…

Did you use Roslyn for the C# support?

Re: I wandered off and built an IDE

#49
post #36
post #17

@anakic That was an enjoyable read! I have also tried qutting my job as a developer, tried making money by working for myself (and focusing on developing features instead of actually making money, same as you), then returning to a "proper job" as an engineer. There were many recognizable moments in the blog post. I once took a course in entrepreneurship, as a distraction from computer science, and the bottom line is…

I think that there's a rising "Maker" culture that focuses on building first and launching fast. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6reLWfFNer0

That is very interesting, thank you!

Re: I wandered off and built an IDE

#50
post #17

@anakic That was an enjoyable read! I have also tried qutting my job as a developer, tried making money by working for myself (and focusing on developing features instead of actually making money, same as you), then returning to a "proper job" as an engineer. There were many recognizable moments in the blog post. I once took a course in entrepreneurship, as a distraction from computer science, and the bottom line is…

Thanks for the thoughtful comment! This is my first try at entrepreneurship. I'd be lying if I said that I'm always sure it was worth it. Most of the time, though, I really think it is, regardless of if it's commercially a success or not. Probably sounds corny, but for a product to work commercially, it needs to have both passion from your end and usefulness on the other. I think if there's no passion, it's probably not going anywhere and even if it does it's not worth it.
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