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I wandered off and built an IDE

blog.querystorm.com

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Re: I wandered off and built an IDE

#171

Post by Lich »

anakic wrote: post #4
nolok wrote: post #2

I have to say, without even looking at the actual product, seeing it use the FooStorm naming from jetbrains while being a paid product isn't inspiring much confidence.

Yeah, I do get that comment every now and then. It was originally called ThingieQuery, but then I got people saying that they liked it but couldn't ask a manager to buy something called ThingieQuery. I didn't consciously steal the JetBrains naming, but the first time someone pointed it out my reaction was d'oh...

What about EXCELIBUR. "USE THE LEGENDARY POWER OF EXCELIBUR TO SLAY ALL YOUR EXCEL WORRIES!"

P.S.: Referring to Excalibur for those that have never heard of it. It's the legendary sword used by King Arthur.

Re: I wandered off and built an IDE

#172

Post by rsp1984 »

dhimes wrote: post #53
xyproto wrote: 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…

But, as a developer, it's soul-wrenching and just feels wrong to try to sell something before something proper has even been made. This has been my biggest struggle.

I think it's worth pointing out that in order to "sell" to investors (as opposed to customers), having the product (and the customers!) ready actually is very important.

So the proper sequence is:

    1. Sell.
    2. Build.
    3. Pitch to investors.
    4. Repeat with more resources.
Inexperienced non-technical founders sometimes get the steps 1-3 backwards.

Re: I wandered off and built an IDE

#173

Post by Quarrelsome »

We have a bunch of people that have to build and maintain VBA excel files for our clients. We'd really rather not maintain all this VBA crap. Can we replace that with this? Can it deploy files with all those horrible rules or is it more primitive than that and only functions as an IDE for personal Excel munging?

Re: I wandered off and built an IDE

#174

Post by noam87 »

jason_slack wrote: post #157
Double_a_92 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Textbased internet surfing must be awesome.

You would be quite surprised actually. Try it and see how often you decide to use it over a graphical browser.

What do you use? -- I've tried with lynx and its ilk but I find that too many websites these days are completely broken without javascript, and the layout often unreadable without CSS.

Re: I wandered off and built an IDE

#176

Post by kirubakaran »

the-dude wrote: post #156
fastball wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh god. I was so confused by your comment because this guy is on a Polish accelerator and I was trying to figure out how that was relevant.

I noticed directly after posting, decided to keep it.

No pun in ten did get upvotes though.

Re: I wandered off and built an IDE

#177

Post by mistermann »

How hard would it be to add support for calling Python scripts, so an advanced person could use one of the many internet articles on Pandas scraping/etl/mashups to pre-process some data before bringing in as an excel table?

Re: I wandered off and built an IDE

#178

Post by dgudkov »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #173

We have a bunch of people that have to build and maintain VBA excel files for our clients. We'd really rather not maintain all this VBA crap. Can we replace that with this? Can it deploy files with all those horrible rules or is it more primitive than that and only functions as an IDE for personal Excel munging?

Check out my EasyMorph (http://easymorph.com). It's pretty good for replacing VBA scripting in Excel files.

Re: I wandered off and built an IDE

#179

Post by methodin »

nl wrote: post #168
wpietri wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having built some very cool things that in the end nobody bought, I strongly disagree that one should just build the thing and then try to sell it. I also disagree that these two approaches lead to evolution vs revolution. Even if you have a revolutionary idea, and even if you can build it, it's still a waste of time if nobody will buy it. No matter how revolutionary your idea, you can try marketing it. If you are ev…

So I entirely believed this advice, completely and absolutely. And then I started my current project. I'm working on a thing now which no one believes is possible in the AI space (and to be honest I didn't either). So I built a tech demo which proved to myself that it really does work. Now I do the "I'm doing XXXX", get the cynical "yeah right" look, but the idea is interesting enough that people are prepared to see…

I think a tech demo is in line with this thinking - selling it first doesn't mean there can't be anything of substance. It means you didn't invest a year of your life taking the tech demo and making a full-blown product out of it before showing it to people. I think many products have substance that people would buy but the execution is way off and it makes it unappealing.

Re: I wandered off and built an IDE

#180

Post by onychomys »

laurentl wrote: post #15

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…

If you're already exporting to CSV, why bring it back in for the graphing? There are plenty of decent python graphing libraries. Or if you hated all of those, you could always just use R, which will make basically any graph you could ever need (...and do the data analysis for you too).
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