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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

#191

Post by badloginagain »

gnud wrote: post #110
foobarchu wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you ever worried about Microsoft a feature that acts similar in a future version of Excel? It's a problem that has bit others before (Firebug, Growl, tabbed-browsing extensions for IE).

I don't think Microsoft would be able to produce something that was just ready, without having to create a project or click through a wizard first. Much of this functionality is available already, through ODBC, powershell, c# - but it's cumbersome to use. That's the selling point of this software, it seems to me.

You guys, Microsoft just acquires the already built project and our happy dev get his mansion.

Re: I wandered off and built an IDE

#192

Post by anakic »

galen211 wrote: post #69

This is great - I refuse to mess with VBA and I've been doing all my spreadsheet regex work using R/RStudio until now. The regex feature alone could save me tons of hours in my consulting job.

Fantastic! If you're up for it, I'd love to demo and discuss over screen share. If you'd be interested let me know via email, it's antonio at querystorm dot com.

Re: I wandered off and built an IDE

#194

Post by tomaszj »

anakic wrote: post #60
EnderMB wrote: post #39

That 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:(

Yeah, I'd love a version for Mac. I like what I see, but I've got a Mac-only setup. I wonder if you could make use of VSCode with Excel somehow?

Re: I wandered off and built an IDE

#195

Post by memorylimit »

examancer wrote: post #190
jason_slack wrote: post #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.

Impressed a girl once who's friend had a Mac Classic with important files that needed to be removed. The only removable storage option was a broken floppy drive. It did have a network card, but couldn't find any way to move files to my modern mac, linux, or windows machines over the network. It did have an ancient version of Netscape, so I tried to upload the files, but the browser was just too old to handle Dropbox,…

FTP?

Re: I wandered off and built an IDE

#196

Post by nickpsecurity »

Great writing. Cool project. What it sounds like is there's going to be piles of use-cases in different companies for something like this that are all different. I suggest a model of selling companies custom solutions to those that all leverage your plug-in or tech. You might license the underlying tech itself, too. So, the start could be something like:

1. Surveys on places with lots of Excel users worded to figure out what jobs they have that take lots of manual steps with days of effort. This is your potential market.

2. Maybe immediately create proposals for the ones you could handle easily as a one-man shop. That's some revenue to get you started.

3. Look for any common patterns in them you can abstract into generic functions or generators. This becomes part of your tooling.

4. Also, look for any kinds of analysis that happen pretty often in certain industries. Then, you might create some basic functionality to as industry-specific solutions that your customization work builds on. If not that, it could just be a marketing tool illustrating the value your software provides to that segment.

Those are the ideas that came to mind as I read your article. Good luck.

Re: I wandered off and built an IDE

#197

Post by eagsalazar2 »

jason_slack wrote: post #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.

My wife is the only non-dev, family or friend, male or female, who I ever convinced to switch to Linux from Windows/Mac and who actually loved it and stuck with it despite me being a major Linux evangelist for about 10 years. Coincidence? (Although sadly I've now caved and use Mac and she's on a Chromebook. Fucking kids have ruined us!)

Re: I wandered off and built an IDE

#198

Post by brk »

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.

Here is how I have rectified this for myself (though I am not the hardcore developed of some on HN, I've hacked a lot of stuff together for fun and profit).

Developers rarely know what users really want in advance. Hell, even users don't know what users really want. Re-writes are time consuming (and, to me, boring), it is easier to do the minimal amount of work first, demo that, take feedback, and then build it out.

However, going into this you need to have faith in yourself that you can deliver something good, and on time. If you have that confidence in yourself that you can deliver the functionality expected in a reasonable time frame, you can possibly be more comfortable selling ahead of your delivery schedule.

Re: I wandered off and built an IDE

#199

Post by jason_slack »

noam87 wrote: post #174
jason_slack wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lynx, plus I have made my own enhancements over the years for the way I like to browse.
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