This makes me wish I had to do more grunt work in Excel.
I wandered off and built an IDE
121–130 of 273 posts
Re: I wandered off and built an IDE
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
Ah OK, thank you! I couldn't see any actual 'chat' feature - is that because I wasn't logged in ?
Re: I wandered off and built an IDE
#123I also had to help my ex-girlfriend (preschool director) make google drive scripts to generate tables. I found small businesses have great need for this type of things. I explored this as a startup idea.
And was it successful?
No I have never done it, I just thought there is a great need for it. The reason is because I can't formalize my idea. I want to make this thing useful and simple at the same time, but it's hard.
google drive script, for example, is still too complex to use for non-tech, it doesn't have a ui builder.
but I can't imagine a simpler, drag-and-drop solution that can implement complex data processing logic.
Re: I wandered off and built an IDE
#124I thought this sounded pretty cool: > It doesn't copy the data into it, it actually lets the SQLite engine use Excel tables as the data storage (I implemented something SQLite calls a virtual table - an adapter to let it work with custom data sources). This means you can run update/delete/insert statements directly on excel tables (from the linked reddit post, I haven't finished the blog post) I wonder if a similar s…
Yep, that's just what FDWs are for-- modular storage layer. Plenty of cool hacks :)
Re: I wandered off and built an IDE
#125@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…
Accurate. In understatementship it’s called “over-promise”. But inventing non existing products or features is the current industry standard in startups. Call it fraud, call it marketing, get used to it.
Re: I wandered off and built an IDE
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not OP, but even today I still don't understand why is Dropbox different except for hype and media coverage - there were many similar services back then (including integrating as a virtual drive on Windows) and we have literally tons of these services now.
> there were many similar services back then Citations please.
I read a quote of Drew's a while back that stuck with me. Just googled and found it:
"When Dropbox was getting off the ground in 2007, there were hundreds of small storage companies. It was almost a cliche, the way that many people believe mobile photo sharing is a cliche now, he says. “The important thing was, I would keep asking people if they used any one of these hundred options, and they all said no. These are my favorite problems to solve. You can’t focus on what everyone else is doing — it has to be about what’s really broken and what you can do to fix it.”"
http://firstround.com/review/How-to-Win-as-a-First-Time-Foun...
Re: I wandered off and built an IDE
#127An honest question, isn't this kind of what PowerBI is supposed to do?
Re: I wandered off and built an IDE
#128That was a fantastic read. In a world of products and apps that seem to be a solution looking for a problem, it's nice to see a full story illustrating a common problem, and how a technical person came to provide a featured solution to that problem. I think I already know the answer to this, but I assume that this IDE is Windows only? I couldn't see any information about platforms on the main product page, which migh…
Glad you enjoyed it! I think I know what you assume and I assume you assume correctly. Windows only so far, Excel for Mac doesn't have VSTO:(
With .NET running everywhere now, I'm hoping VSTO for Mac Office isn't far behind. I really want to use the Grammarly plugin on my Mac also.
Re: I wandered off and built an IDE
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be honest - dropbox is still burning investors money, right? AFAIK they are not profitable even today.
They’re about to IPO. Doesn’t mean they’re profitable, but it does mean their finances are healthy enough that they can be publicly traded.
They already IPO’d. :-)
Re: I wandered off and built an IDE
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not OP, but even today I still don't understand why is Dropbox different except for hype and media coverage - there were many similar services back then (including integrating as a virtual drive on Windows) and we have literally tons of these services now.
> there were many similar services back then Citations please.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_synchroniza...
You can find when each of these companies were founded by following the links...
Don't remember the name, but I remember similar service even in late 90s, when dial-up was popular. You'd pay for some amount of storage hosted on their servers (no "cloud" term back then) and they had Windows client integrated as a drive. Not sure if they had "freemium", maybe dropbox differentiated with this business model.