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This is exactly what led me to build Dependabot - dependency management was a minor pain at my old job that we'd written some scripts to handle better. Another
by greysteil 9y ago
This is exactly what led me to build Dependabot - dependency management was a minor pain at my old job that we'd written some scripts to handle better.
Another group of friends started Personably from exactly the same strategy - we had a script to create dozens of calendar invites for new joiners with all their onboarding details, so things didn't get missed.
- fiatjaf 9y agoAnd is it going well?
- greysteil 9y agoA qualified "yes". Dependabot has ~100 paying customers, and makes just over $2,000 a month. It's still quite a lot of work adding new features, but if I wasn't extending it's functionality it would be passive income. Personably have raised money and landed some big paying customers - I think there's scope for them to be solving a relatively large problem, having started from a duct-tape fix. The only proviso I'd add to the article is that sometimes the problems you find like this are small. Dependabot will never be a full-blown startup - it's scope is too small. That's not necessarily a bad thing, though - I think the problem has still been well worth solving thoroughly. https://dependabot.com https://dependabot.com https://personably.co https://personably.co
- biarity 9y agoDon't any of the langauges you support have options to keep all dependencies up to date? Eg. By putting wildcards in version numbers
- greysteil 9y agoThat’s normally an option for your manifest file (e.g., a Gemfile or package.json), but most production applications also (sensibly) use a lockfile. Updating the versions in that lockfile is what Dependabot is great for.