4 ms·

Ask HN: What potential ideas for developer tooling have not been explored yet?

I recently quit my job and I would love to pursue some sort of lifestyle business, after lurking around in indie hackers a bit, I still haven't found any idea worth pursuing, I would love to work on something related to the developer space, some small tool that can grow organically over time, do you have any suggestions?

bbody 7y ago
Might be a bit out there but I always thought there should be tools which help provide code snippets inside your IDE as you develop. I think Twitter Bootstrap might be a low hanging fruit for this.
- oscar_franco13 7y ago
  Hmm I feel like I have already seen this before, including vscode intellisense which is powered by some ML models
  - abhijat 7y ago
    There is https://tabnine.com/ https://tabnine.com/
mmvs 7y ago
This may be helpful for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOtCl5PU8F0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOtCl5PU8F0 and also this book is written just for your case, strongly recommend reading it: https://startupbook.net/ https://startupbook.net/
- oscar_franco13 7y ago
  thanks a lot I will take a look!
makeee 7y ago
One of my favorite examples of a small, successful dev tool is https://getcssscan.com https://getcssscan.com. You can already see styles in your browser dev tools for free, but this tool is just so much faster/easier that people are happy to pay (dev has done $70k in sales). As a starting point, it might be worth exploring other browser dev tool features and consider what each would look like if turned into a product. Another space that has a lot of potential is tooling that helps people skip the boilerplate that goes into setting up a new project. I'm working on one for React at https://divjoy.com https://divjoy.com, but I'm sure there are a bunch of other ways to make project setup easier.
- oscar_franco13 7y ago
  getcssscan is great, aren't extensions easy to pirate? that would be one concern of mine After writing this yesterday I had an idea about stress testing, I had to test a few of my services in the past, but it has always been a combination of scripts and/or postman requests, it all feels very tedious, I saw there are already big SaaS players in the market, for example loader.io from sendgrid, but I feel like there is space for a simple tool, postman like, where I can just quickly configure some parameters and fire away from my machine... If things go well and there is more demand for it, it can be integrated with a SaaS backing, WDYT?

bbody 7y ago

Might be a bit out there but I always thought there should be tools which help provide code snippets inside your IDE as you develop. I think Twitter Bootstrap might be a low hanging fruit for this.

oscar_franco13 7y ago
Hmm I feel like I have already seen this before, including vscode intellisense which is powered by some ML models
- abhijat 7y ago
  There is https://tabnine.com/ https://tabnine.com/

mmvs 7y ago

This may be helpful for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOtCl5PU8F0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOtCl5PU8F0 and also this book is written just for your case, strongly recommend reading it: https://startupbook.net/ https://startupbook.net/

oscar_franco13 7y ago
thanks a lot I will take a look!

makeee 7y ago

One of my favorite examples of a small, successful dev tool is https://getcssscan.com https://getcssscan.com. You can already see styles in your browser dev tools for free, but this tool is just so much faster/easier that people are happy to pay (dev has done $70k in sales). As a starting point, it might be worth exploring other browser dev tool features and consider what each would look like if turned into a product. Another space that has a lot of potential is tooling that helps people skip the boilerplate that goes into setting up a new project. I'm working on one for React at https://divjoy.com https://divjoy.com, but I'm sure there are a bunch of other ways to make project setup easier.

oscar_franco13 7y ago
getcssscan is great, aren't extensions easy to pirate? that would be one concern of mine After writing this yesterday I had an idea about stress testing, I had to test a few of my services in the past, but it has always been a combination of scripts and/or postman requests, it all feels very tedious, I saw there are already big SaaS players in the market, for example loader.io from sendgrid, but I feel like there is space for a simple tool, postman like, where I can just quickly configure some parameters and fire away from my machine... If things go well and there is more demand for it, it can be integrated with a SaaS backing, WDYT?