Hey there HN! We're a pair of devs looking to get feedback for our open-source project.
We're remote engineers who have contracted for many clients overseas. There's a problem that all codebases share: Onboarding devs to a new codebase is hard no matter what.
We're also open-source engineers and learned about the techniques used in OSS to tackle the problem. Please give us your feedback.
Hey, congrats on the open source approach! I do have a question on your strategy though. How do you get valuable feedback from users? What incentive does your users have in order to communicate with you back and forth trying to build a better product?
Ty! Open source is a very important part of our philosophy.
1. We track which GitHub usernames and repos that use Watermelon, it's the only thing we track. This allows us to go to people and ask them for more detailed feedback. We also get feedback from stargazers and forkers. Because we're open source, people also leave GH issues.
2. The incentive is something very basic: They wanna see a better version of this out there in the world.
According to the repo it is more than just username and repo, the local user account and email address is also tracked [1]. I'd argue that you shouldn't be recording email since that is PII. And repo name and repo owner since the names could be considered trade secrets within organizations. Recording the local user account could be considered sensitive information since it could aid hacking the organization. Finally I don't think you should be recording the GitHub username as well since usage patterns could be analyzed to determine the timezone of the user, which is also considered sensitive personal information in some large corporations that track user behavior data.
Sorry, but I don't think you should request feedback from users without their explicit permission. Isn't there a feedback mechanism built into VSCode already, or make and affordance for one in your plugin UI? Maybe at best generate a random install ID that can be reset for analytics and session tracking? VSCode has guidelines for this, see [2].
Hey!
This is great insight, honestly wasn’t aware and you’re right.
Any chance of sending a PR for this?
Would you be interested on talking about employment with us (open to part time)?
We are a fully remote company.
I saw that Watermelon was on HN and I did made a first comment, because I have been following the project and I like to support other founders who happen to be my friends.
And indeed, they are "lucky" to have people that like the team and project. Hope that it is the same case with you and people that you know :).
Then, as a good friend, take the time to provide a comment with more insights. We will all benefit from them. I looked at the comments because the website has not a lot of information and I was expecting to learn more from the comments.
Note: This is the first time I looked at the origins of comments in a submission because they really looked like fake comments and this annoyed me terribly as I want HN to stay free of them.
That's true thanks. I'm a heavy user/consumer of YC content, SUS and events, but not of HN. Indeed it would have been more useful for both the community and the team to provide an insightful comment.
Anyways, hope you get the opportunity to try Watermelon and give them an unbiased opinion (as I probably would do), which will help them :)
Hey Esteban, it’s Sebastian. Huge congrats on your HackerNews launch!!!
I had the pleasure of working with Esteban (aka baristaGeek) at Cerebrum. Great guy. There’s a saying that the best employees go on to be founders, and I can definitely see that in what Watermelon is becoming. Very exciting!
And yes! The code onboarding problem is always there. Watermelon providing that historical context is huge.
P.S. I just happened to find this at the bottom of the homepage. I had no idea Esteban would be posting here, I just browse HN a lot.
super cool! have long been interested in tooling for making code archaeology easier!
any plans for building extensions for various issue/work tracking systems, wikis, email archives, etc? i've longed for comprehensive views across tickets, pull requests, bug reports and wikis for all relevant knowledge for a given effort in past.
Yes! We're exploring Jira, and Notion integrations mostly. We're discarding Slack for the moment because of the technical feasibility, but would be something we look further down the road.
What's your opinion about the create docs direction we're exploring to complement your Indiana Jones coding? (Love your "code archeology" term).
that is less interesting to me personally as that's often handled locally. (most sites with many projects will have some sort of locally customized project boilerplate or template to start with).
i'm more interested in tooling that gives as much context as possible for why something is the way it is. code ages like a novel would as passed through the telephone game. the more context that is readily available for each generation of changes, the more consistent the design remains in the long run.
also, it's incredibly handy when in emergency breakfix situations.
I've been following Esteban's project recently, I like the product very much it's really handy to give context on what we do on daily basis (coding in my case :D). Build in the open is the way to go, best of lucks to the watermelon team!
Love this! If you can pull in info from Slack/Discord convos that would be a big unlock. Do you plan to make this available to private repos shortly? Would love to try it out on an internal one, as we always find ourselves repeating information when onboarding new team members.
I wonder what are the future plans and features of Watermelon? Currently it feels like it does not bring a lot, or any, new things to VS Code ecosystem.
- GitLens is the extension every Git user should have installed, and it for example automatically gives you the git blame on every line
Then depending a bit on the version control system & language used, there are "native" extension for PR and documentation.
- Github pull requests & issues integrates nicely with the GitLens blame - hover the blame and you'll see the PR. Also has bunch of PR & Issues related functionalities
- autoDocstring (Python) for generating documentation "automatically" inside the code, where it belongs IMHO.
Hi and Ty for your comment. This is exactly the kinds of questions that we wanna see here because we learn new things with such.
1. GitLens is useful but it only gives you the author of a line, and the commit message. We can do way better than that as we keep indexing info from more sources + organize it in different ways
2. Similar as number 1. We will index info from more sources and organize it better.
3. Didn’t know about autoDocstring but it looks like a great analogous tool to JSDoc. We’ve used JS Doc and think it’s great for documenting functions. However, we believe there is an opportunity for documenting greater level stuff such as the architecture and the relations between modules.
We're remote engineers who have contracted for many clients overseas. There's a problem that all codebases share: Onboarding devs to a new codebase is hard no matter what.
We're also open-source engineers and learned about the techniques used in OSS to tackle the problem. Please give us your feedback.
Homepage: https://watermelon.tools/
Repo: https://github.com/watermelontools/wm-extension
Install: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Watermel...
Hey! Esteban, the CTO of watermelon here. Feel free to ask any questions, open to answering them :)
So many Estebans…
This concept is very cool. Interesting approach to visualize git blame and the team behind looks outstanding. Congrats guys, downloaded.
Ty very much! We're glad we're adding value.
Love the open-source approach. Congrats! Great product
Ty! This has been an important pillar for us since day 1. We believe a lot in the open source ethos, its transparency, and its collaborativeness.
Amazing concept! I have been following the process and I'm really excited to see what you guys accomplish. Congrats!
Ty Alan! It's great to be surrounded by smart technical people like you.
Hey, congrats on the open source approach! I do have a question on your strategy though. How do you get valuable feedback from users? What incentive does your users have in order to communicate with you back and forth trying to build a better product?
Ty! Open source is a very important part of our philosophy.
1. We track which GitHub usernames and repos that use Watermelon, it's the only thing we track. This allows us to go to people and ask them for more detailed feedback. We also get feedback from stargazers and forkers. Because we're open source, people also leave GH issues.
2. The incentive is something very basic: They wanna see a better version of this out there in the world.
According to the repo it is more than just username and repo, the local user account and email address is also tracked [1]. I'd argue that you shouldn't be recording email since that is PII. And repo name and repo owner since the names could be considered trade secrets within organizations. Recording the local user account could be considered sensitive information since it could aid hacking the organization. Finally I don't think you should be recording the GitHub username as well since usage patterns could be analyzed to determine the timezone of the user, which is also considered sensitive personal information in some large corporations that track user behavior data.
Sorry, but I don't think you should request feedback from users without their explicit permission. Isn't there a feedback mechanism built into VSCode already, or make and affordance for one in your plugin UI? Maybe at best generate a random install ID that can be reset for analytics and session tracking? VSCode has guidelines for this, see [2].
[1] https://github.com/watermelontools/wm-extension/blob/c389125...
[2] https://code.visualstudio.com/api/extension-guides/telemetry...
Hey! This is great insight, honestly wasn’t aware and you’re right. Any chance of sending a PR for this? Would you be interested on talking about employment with us (open to part time)? We are a fully remote company.
Cool, it's great you'll look into it! Although I like working with dev tools, unfortunately I can't take on additional projects at the moment.
Please let us know if anything changes on your side!
Used it some weeks ago to understand a package in the kubernetes codebase. Its great for getting insights on an unfamiliar project
Thanks! If you have any suggestions for us please open up an issue on our repo.
Curious why it is named watermelon.
It's the happiest fruit and has emoji :)
nicorojas9, alan_arguello, jgarzonebrath and oarojas were all accounts which are between 2 year and 90 day old without any comments.
Suddenly they decided to comment for the first time on this specific submission.
And all within one hour.
And all to basically write the same thing.
The Watermelon authors are lucky or maybe it is Friday the 13th.
Wow this Sherlock Holmes-level research.
Our close friends did notice we launched. Lol.
It isn't very hard to click on the usernames after you see some suspicious messaging from similar accounts.
Recalibrate your sarcasm detector?
Always happy to verify my identity Loic.
I saw that Watermelon was on HN and I did made a first comment, because I have been following the project and I like to support other founders who happen to be my friends.
And indeed, they are "lucky" to have people that like the team and project. Hope that it is the same case with you and people that you know :).
Then, as a good friend, take the time to provide a comment with more insights. We will all benefit from them. I looked at the comments because the website has not a lot of information and I was expecting to learn more from the comments.
Note: This is the first time I looked at the origins of comments in a submission because they really looked like fake comments and this annoyed me terribly as I want HN to stay free of them.
That's true thanks. I'm a heavy user/consumer of YC content, SUS and events, but not of HN. Indeed it would have been more useful for both the community and the team to provide an insightful comment.
Anyways, hope you get the opportunity to try Watermelon and give them an unbiased opinion (as I probably would do), which will help them :)
Hey Esteban, it’s Sebastian. Huge congrats on your HackerNews launch!!!
I had the pleasure of working with Esteban (aka baristaGeek) at Cerebrum. Great guy. There’s a saying that the best employees go on to be founders, and I can definitely see that in what Watermelon is becoming. Very exciting!
And yes! The code onboarding problem is always there. Watermelon providing that historical context is huge.
P.S. I just happened to find this at the bottom of the homepage. I had no idea Esteban would be posting here, I just browse HN a lot.
Ty Sebastian! Yeah, Cerebrum was an awesome school.
Hope we're adding value with our historical context tool. Always glad to listen to your feedback.
Haha! "The other Esteban" here. Thanks for the comment, we've been hard at work. Hope to see you again soon!
super cool! have long been interested in tooling for making code archaeology easier!
any plans for building extensions for various issue/work tracking systems, wikis, email archives, etc? i've longed for comprehensive views across tickets, pull requests, bug reports and wikis for all relevant knowledge for a given effort in past.
It looks like integration with ticketing systems is on the roadmap https://github.com/orgs/watermelontools/projects/1.
Yes! We're exploring Jira, and Notion integrations mostly. We're discarding Slack for the moment because of the technical feasibility, but would be something we look further down the road.
What's your opinion about the create docs direction we're exploring to complement your Indiana Jones coding? (Love your "code archeology" term).
that is less interesting to me personally as that's often handled locally. (most sites with many projects will have some sort of locally customized project boilerplate or template to start with).
i'm more interested in tooling that gives as much context as possible for why something is the way it is. code ages like a novel would as passed through the telephone game. the more context that is readily available for each generation of changes, the more consistent the design remains in the long run.
also, it's incredibly handy when in emergency breakfix situations.
Ty very much! We'll keep this in mind.
I've been following Esteban's project recently, I like the product very much it's really handy to give context on what we do on daily basis (coding in my case :D). Build in the open is the way to go, best of lucks to the watermelon team!
Ty! Yeah we're an open company (open source, open roadmap, open salaries) and it has worked great.
I've been following this project for so long, super cool to see you guys here!
Ty! Always looking to learn about new ways to add value to you
Love this! If you can pull in info from Slack/Discord convos that would be a big unlock. Do you plan to make this available to private repos shortly? Would love to try it out on an internal one, as we always find ourselves repeating information when onboarding new team members.
Hi there and Ty!
1. We are already available for private repos. If you authenticate you’ll be able to use us on any GH private repo
2. Yes! We’re exploring integrating Notion, Jira, and Slack. Stay tuned!
I wonder what are the future plans and features of Watermelon? Currently it feels like it does not bring a lot, or any, new things to VS Code ecosystem.
- GitLens is the extension every Git user should have installed, and it for example automatically gives you the git blame on every line
Then depending a bit on the version control system & language used, there are "native" extension for PR and documentation.
- Github pull requests & issues integrates nicely with the GitLens blame - hover the blame and you'll see the PR. Also has bunch of PR & Issues related functionalities
- autoDocstring (Python) for generating documentation "automatically" inside the code, where it belongs IMHO.
Hi and Ty for your comment. This is exactly the kinds of questions that we wanna see here because we learn new things with such.
1. GitLens is useful but it only gives you the author of a line, and the commit message. We can do way better than that as we keep indexing info from more sources + organize it in different ways
2. Similar as number 1. We will index info from more sources and organize it better.
3. Didn’t know about autoDocstring but it looks like a great analogous tool to JSDoc. We’ve used JS Doc and think it’s great for documenting functions. However, we believe there is an opportunity for documenting greater level stuff such as the architecture and the relations between modules.
Sounds good, keep up the good work!