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Build a company around creating a best in class development environment that they can sell to other tech companies. This would involve everything from repositor

by harryh 13y ago

Build a company around creating a best in class development environment that they can sell to other tech companies. This would involve everything from repository management (on top of git) to build & compilation tooling to automated testing and probably more than that eventually. Once companies reach a certain scale they inevitably expend some of their resources on building internal development tools. At Foursquare we have 1 person (on a team of ~80) doing this fulltime. Google has spent a ton of effort on this with blaze. Facebook & Twitter have done similar work. But it's all fragmented and it's all reinventing the wheel. A company should do this right for everyone. If it was good enough I'd happily write very very large checks to use it. Honestly I think this is what GitHub should be doing, but they don't appear to have their shit together enough to innovate so someone else should do it.

simpleAJ 13y ago
How about Phabricator- http://phabricator.org/ http://phabricator.org/
- harryh 13y ago
  That's part of the puzzle, but it's (AFAIK) mostly for code review and bug tracking. I'm very much interested in the build tooling & automated testing (& probably also deployment) pieces.
  - epriest 13y ago
    This stuff is still in beta and not generally useful, but we have Harbormaster (Build/CI), Drydock (software resource management) and Releeph (release management) in the pipeline.
icefox 13y ago
Hmm, would Atlassian count?
- sdesol 13y ago
  Atlassian's product line suffers from the disjoint problem, which makes sense since they bought most of their products from other companies. To tackle this problem, you really have to have a unified base that all your tools are built on and it has to be flexible enough to work with any possible process and workflow. My GitSense product is very similar to their fisheye product and due to how my system was built, I can actually integrate better with their own product line than fisheye can.
hackaflocka 13y ago
Thing is, "best in class" means different things to different people (and companies). E.g., which PC platform is best in class? OS X, Windows or one of the flavors of Linux?
- harryh 13y ago
  I agree that this is a potential problem. Is it possible to making something flexible enough to fit the individual needs of lots of different companies? I feel like it should be, but I certainly don't know for sure.
sdesol 13y ago
This is actually what I'm trying to do with my product http://gitsense.com http://gitsense.com GitSense is marketed as a Git solution but it's also a proof of concept for a much bigger problem that I'm trying to solve, which I believe will be critical for being able do develop tools that can work in any environment, regardless of size, process, politics, etc. What is not obvious, which is mostly my fault due to poor marketing, is the tools in GitSense are context aware and adaptable. With GitSense, I can drop it into any enterprise environment and have it work in a way that makes the most sense to them. And what I have learned from developing GitSense, we'll be the basis for creating smarter wikis, bug trackers, continuous build systems, etc. I'm currently working on a blog post right now that talks about my programmable metadata technology, which demonstrates the benefits of having context aware and adaptable tools. As a side now, I'm also looking for one or more co-founder to execute this larger vision of mine. So if you are interested in tackling this problem, send me an email. You can find my email in my profile.
kylemaxwell 13y ago
You mean nitrous.io?
jayjohnson 13y ago
How intrusive would the developer environment have to be? We're a "host your own REST service" development shop so deploying and testing your own GitHub repo is done with a dashboard from a web page. In our eyes, everything outside of code development and code hosting should take place in a web page complemented with command line tools for advanced control. The feedback we have heard is the editor of choice is near-and-dear to a developer and would be difficult to force a new tool on anyone to edit code. Code hosting has a good solution with GitHub too. Which leaves testing and deployment up to the platform. Since we focus on giving two free REST services for publishing your own Jobs we put the deployment and testing into our web dashboard (and cli tool). Testing a REST API is easy and already integrated into our dashboard similar to Postman. The only code a developer has to write is a Job which is just 3 simple parts (inputs, outputs, and tasks). For us we wanted the .Net debugging power for every developer from our dashboard so we built it to identify tests that fail validation based off your test inputs and outputs versus your test's expected outputs. Let me know what you think here's our beta vision based off our feedback for quickly developing and deploying REST API services for your own Jobs: https://flowstacks.com/developer/ https://flowstacks.com/developer/ Cheers
xerophtye 13y ago
I hear microsoft's suite integrates well with each other to achieve that. But alas, that's just for .NET But what's wrong with IntelliJ?? We use it for Java EE and it works pretty darn well. Repository Management, Local server management, Compilation/deployment, it has everything and its executed pretty well. Although i suppose it's restricted to java...

by harryh 13y ago

simpleAJ 13y ago

How about Phabricator- http://phabricator.org/ http://phabricator.org/

harryh 13y ago
That's part of the puzzle, but it's (AFAIK) mostly for code review and bug tracking. I'm very much interested in the build tooling & automated testing (& probably also deployment) pieces.
- epriest 13y ago
  This stuff is still in beta and not generally useful, but we have Harbormaster (Build/CI), Drydock (software resource management) and Releeph (release management) in the pipeline.

icefox 13y ago

Hmm, would Atlassian count?

sdesol 13y ago
Atlassian's product line suffers from the disjoint problem, which makes sense since they bought most of their products from other companies. To tackle this problem, you really have to have a unified base that all your tools are built on and it has to be flexible enough to work with any possible process and workflow. My GitSense product is very similar to their fisheye product and due to how my system was built, I can actually integrate better with their own product line than fisheye can.

hackaflocka 13y ago

Thing is, "best in class" means different things to different people (and companies). E.g., which PC platform is best in class? OS X, Windows or one of the flavors of Linux?

harryh 13y ago
I agree that this is a potential problem. Is it possible to making something flexible enough to fit the individual needs of lots of different companies? I feel like it should be, but I certainly don't know for sure.

sdesol 13y ago

This is actually what I'm trying to do with my product http://gitsense.com http://gitsense.com GitSense is marketed as a Git solution but it's also a proof of concept for a much bigger problem that I'm trying to solve, which I believe will be critical for being able do develop tools that can work in any environment, regardless of size, process, politics, etc. What is not obvious, which is mostly my fault due to poor marketing, is the tools in GitSense are context aware and adaptable. With GitSense, I can drop it into any enterprise environment and have it work in a way that makes the most sense to them. And what I have learned from developing GitSense, we'll be the basis for creating smarter wikis, bug trackers, continuous build systems, etc. I'm currently working on a blog post right now that talks about my programmable metadata technology, which demonstrates the benefits of having context aware and adaptable tools. As a side now, I'm also looking for one or more co-founder to execute this larger vision of mine. So if you are interested in tackling this problem, send me an email. You can find my email in my profile.

kylemaxwell 13y ago

You mean nitrous.io?

jayjohnson 13y ago

How intrusive would the developer environment have to be? We're a "host your own REST service" development shop so deploying and testing your own GitHub repo is done with a dashboard from a web page. In our eyes, everything outside of code development and code hosting should take place in a web page complemented with command line tools for advanced control. The feedback we have heard is the editor of choice is near-and-dear to a developer and would be difficult to force a new tool on anyone to edit code. Code hosting has a good solution with GitHub too. Which leaves testing and deployment up to the platform. Since we focus on giving two free REST services for publishing your own Jobs we put the deployment and testing into our web dashboard (and cli tool). Testing a REST API is easy and already integrated into our dashboard similar to Postman. The only code a developer has to write is a Job which is just 3 simple parts (inputs, outputs, and tasks). For us we wanted the .Net debugging power for every developer from our dashboard so we built it to identify tests that fail validation based off your test inputs and outputs versus your test's expected outputs. Let me know what you think here's our beta vision based off our feedback for quickly developing and deploying REST API services for your own Jobs: https://flowstacks.com/developer/ https://flowstacks.com/developer/ Cheers

xerophtye 13y ago

I hear microsoft's suite integrates well with each other to achieve that. But alas, that's just for .NET But what's wrong with IntelliJ?? We use it for Java EE and it works pretty darn well. Repository Management, Local server management, Compilation/deployment, it has everything and its executed pretty well. Although i suppose it's restricted to java...