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Show HN: I've been making JavaScript sandbox alone for 6 years (playcode.io)

397 points by ianberdin ↗ HN
Hi HN! Thanks for your attention to my post.

It was a big challenge to run most of Node.js packages in browser, fast moreover. Virtual File system, resolve import/export. I got cold many times, depressions, burned out, yet still alive and finished it.

Many guys helped me with an advice. Many users give a lot of positive feedback. There are 200,000 monthly unique users.

I work full time now because of the freemium business model. To be honest - I am happy after many years of hard work.

106 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] thread
sgammon
I love this. Could it be embedded for use in other software? Curious as we might have a use case if so.
mehal
I was thinking the same! What’s your use-case for embedding?
ianberdin
Thank you for the feedback. Can you please tell me about the case? Here or at ruslan@ playcode.io
sgammon
I’ll drop you a line :)
joshuajomiller
How do you stay motivated to continue working on this alone for such a long time?
TAForObvReasons
You charge money and it becomes your livelihood. No obvious pricing page, but uBlock Origin detects Stripe scripts
ianberdin
Right, it is not fully free. And it makes sense, right?
ianberdin
Thanks for the question. It is the biggest problem ever. I wanted to stop a million times. A super hard problem to solve and super taugh to get motivation to move forward.

There are few quotes which helps me in bad days: "I choose whether I will succeed or not.»

endorphine
Care to share other similar quotes? I've been working on a passion project for a few months and I definitely have my downs in terms of motivation.
ctxc
Hey, what are you working on? :D
ianberdin
- "Defeat is a temporary thing."

- "Nothing could stop him."

- "One of the most common reasons for failure is the tendency to quit the game, faced with temporary defeats, and immediately give up."

- "Despite any difficulties, we must continue the work we have started"

All about the same :)

htp
I’m a fan of this one:

  Never give up on a dream just because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway.
  
  Earl Nightingale
asicsp
I use this quote as inspiration (don't remember where I adapted it from):

>Doing is often better than thinking of doing

fbarred
Resubmit with "Show HN" in the title? Then it will be visible in https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew and https://news.ycombinator.co.m/show
ianberdin
Thanks, I just tried, yet HN do not allow to submit multiple times.
Gys
Send an email to the contact at the bottom of each page. They are very helpful.
ianberdin
Sent, still no response. Maybe he is at weekend.
pbhjpbhj
@dang ? Sometimes the mod will show up when tagged, although officially there isn't any user tagging here.
dang
We've added it now.
shmde
I actually used this as an online editor for my Javascript interview. I love the interface and the pure dark mode throughout the UI.
ianberdin
Wow really? Thank you. I had a pretty “dark” year when: I was unable to finish 3rd release with real-time collaboration, nested project folders, flexible permissions, workspaces, offline cache and many more as Notion has. And it was too much for myself. Just unable to merge it to production because of many changes. So that is sad. I wish to move some of this features to production. It will be nice to use in coding bootcamps, schools, finding interview, etc.
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mrtksn
One reason for the love part of my love-hate relationship with JS is its low barrier to get from 0 to productive thanks to tools like this(and the console in the browser dev tools).

JS actually has a lot of buffer until you hit the bloat.

ianberdin
Absolutely. I was Golang/Python dev before. Node.js is so nice and simple compared. Love it.
tentacleuno
If I were to offer some feedback, the English on the homepage needs some tightening up. There's some bad grammar in there. That would definitely make it look a bit more professional :-)
ianberdin
It would be awesome if you can help. Do you use telegram? @ ruslan_ianberdin
Zanni
Not OP, but here's a couple of quick fixes for you (honestly, your English is pretty good): "Play with any of 2 millions of NPM packages ..." -> "Play with any of 2 million NPM packages ..." "PlayCode is fastest coding experience ever." -> "PlayCode is the fastest coding experience ever." "It helps to avoid looking for a documentation ..." -> "It helps avoid looking for documentation ..."
ianberdin
Thank you for your time.
soxocx
Also note, the section "Bug Finder" on the landingpage just contains the text of the "Emmet" section above it.

Cool project besides that :)

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foxbee
I really like the videos on the landing page. Straight to the point.
pyrossh
Really love the interface. Very simple and easy to use. The themes are good as well.
ianberdin
Thank you! Really pleasant to hear that.
dannersy
Does anyone have experience with the courses?

I'm trying to recommend material for learning to a friend and this looks like a great way to learn and see if there is interest without bogging someone down with environment configuration.

I'd love to hear people's experiences.

lagrange77
Impressive work!

> I work full time now because of the freemium business model.

Not sure, if i understand correctly. You're working fulltime on this project, because the freemium model earns enough to make you a living?

ianberdin
Exactly, I wish it is completely free, Ad free for years. However, full-time job takes energy and time from me and playcode also. So I had to figure out a way to make money to invest my time in PlayCode and its users.
listenallyall
> So I had to figure out a way to make money to invest my time in PlayCode and its users.

This is quite an impressive project, to which you've dedicated 6 years of hard work. If you really have users at Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc., I would just ask them for money. These companies have tons of it and they certainly aren't giving their primary products away for free (don't be distracted by side projects like VSCode or GMail). Inform them that you'll be charging $39/month starting September 1.

> I wish it is completely free, Ad free

I get it, you have benefited from the open-source community and probably use a lot of free tools yourself, and you want to contribute or "give back." But your time, effort, intelligence and persistence are all valuable, don't dismiss that and don't assume you owe anybody stuff for free, especially trillion-dollar corporations.

roetlich
This is actually incredible! The live view updates so fast. There more I look at this the more amazed I am. There's even a feature to publish the page with a custom domain? And there's versioning included. Great job!
ianberdin
Yup, you can publish a blog, a personal page, an app, a Single page application with custom domain and HTTPS :) it will be production ready with CDN.

Thank you for your feedback!

adave
Great achievement just for delivering something after 6 years!!!
ianberdin
Is it? Thanks. My friend's product has 10M views/month and 100K MRR. :) Photopea
pbhjpbhj
Ideas from a non-programmer: Perhaps you can cross-seed somehow, would it be possibly to use your sandbox to procedurally generate imagery in Photopea, for example? Can you pair Photopea up with something like processing.org's p5.js (I think that's what they call it) so people can do image processing use JS and outputting into Photopea?

Also, fwiw, I've read--and consider it useful to reflect on--the idea that one should avoid comparison with others and seek first to compare yourself with yourself: have you improved, are you nearer your goals, have you increase your fulfilment ...

ianberdin
You are absolutely right, thanks. It is better to compare to myself in the past.

I just forwarded your suggestion to him.

kerryoco
do you guys have a discord I can join
murdho
This is very impressive! I also admire that you stayed working on it for 6 years!

Here's a quote I stumbled upon just earlier today: "Genius is eternal patience". I think it applies here too.

Would be great to read a blog post about your journey with ups and downs. Do you plan to write something like that at some point?

ianberdin
Thank you, honestly I do not even know where to start, a lot of ups and downs. Yet, I am just in a middle of a way. If not a begining. I will try to write something, I promise.
ChrisMarshallNY
Great job!

I can sort of relate. I worked on an infrastructure system, almost entirely alone, for ten years, before it was finally taken over by a capable team, and I was able to step away, and it took on a life of its own. It is now a worldwide standard, used daily, by thousands.

I say “sort of,” because it was never something I planned to make money on. It filled a need. Also, and it’s a long story, I had to weather a fairly hefty level of abuse during that time. The demographics of the target user base were … challenging.

It’s all good, now.

One thing all that time brought me, was a really high-Quality product. Lots of time to squash bugs, and iterate the UX.

ianberdin
Insane. I wish you tell more, please! About the abuse: wooah, playcode had and has many abusers, carders , phishing pages. Playcode was banned for many times by hosting providers. A lot of reports from google, Microsoft, etc.

It is so incredible meet a man who run product also. Can we connect? Telegram @ ruslan_ianberdin

ChrisMarshallNY
I don't do Telegram (nothing against it, but I don't really need it). You have options to get in touch w/me from my HN ID. Happy to chat!
metadat
Hey Chris, I tried emailing you @ Gmail before but never got a reply. Wrong address?
ChrisMarshallNY
I replied.

I just sent a second reply.

It will come from a mac.com address.

ChrisMarshallNY
Oh. I just realized that I sent a follow up to the other chap.

Go to my Web site, and use the form.

I did try sending to what I think is your gmail address (I had to guess).

I don't have a gmail address. I did, but Google decided to lock it, and I couldn't get it unlocked, so it's basically just dead space.

selestify
Wow, would you be willing to say which infrastructure system you had worked on?
ChrisMarshallNY
Not in public (not going out of my way to take public credit for it is part of the deal).

However, it's not confidential, and I have no problem sharing it on a one-to-one (also, it isn't too hard to guess).

larodi
Software development is a lone business…
ianberdin
Yeah, it is. My friend is a computer and psychologist.
deanc
If I can offer one minor criticism when i see every major tech company listed as your users, I instantly get a sense of a distrust as people do this to inflate the legitimacy and popularity of their service. Why should we trust the statement that all these companies are using your product? I think it’s disingenuous to suggest that a lone employee uses it or even a collection without an actual commitment from those companies. Imagine if every company that ever had traffic from a Google IP put this on their homepage. I could add it to my blog.
ianberdin
Yep, I understand your feelings. I have Developers from these companies. Not a company itself, I am pretty bad at B2B sales.
scrollaway
Those company-legitimacy boxes are useful for b2b sales when you're trying to sell a product that the companies in question actually pay for. This doesn't seem to be what you're trying to do so IMO I agree with the GP and you're better off removing it.

Look at the ReactJS homepage (https://reactjs.org/), it's the same as yours minus b2b fluff, and heaven knows they could list some companies in there :)

randomdigitz
Who’s to say that person is right? If anything test it. That person may have a personal and incorrect feeling about the logos. They may be worse at b2b sales than you.
enduroman
Make sure you are authorized to use their logos. I know Intel would request removal from sites like this when I worked there.
micromacrofoot
lots of companies put a logo up without permission and just wait for a takedown request, there usually aren’t consequences as long as you comply
TheTaytay
For what it’s worth, as an individual dev, if I can trust the logos, I think it does add social proof. “Trusted by developers at…” can be a way to contextualize it.
autoconfig
As a counterpoint, I don’t think it’s disingenuous and I have zero problems with it. I would only find it disingenuous if the statement made was false (trusted by developers at). Comparing traffic alone with actual usage of a product is weird. Obviously two very different things.
neilv
My favorite use of brand name-dropping is the kind when a competitor of a seed-stage startup generated a news piece on their new partnership with Microsoft...

I was instantly concerned, at a sign of a huge player with major platform control entering our space.

Then I looked into it a bit, and it appeared all the competitor company had gotten is normal free startup cloud credits for Azure.

Zopieux
I find it dubious that employees from FAANGs would use a third -party coding environment when most have stringent policies about intellectual property and data sharing. A sandbox app like this would have to go through security review to be approved for corporate use. If available, the company would prefer to just host the app on prems.

Therefore I'm really curious how the author can tell it's used by FAANG employees. Corporate emails?

Wowfunhappy
I can't tell from the landing page, what are the limitations of the free version / what do you get for subscribing? I always want to know this before I invest my time in anything.
tyingq
There wasn't a link to this page I could find, but Google found this: https://playcode.io/pricing

If that's current, the free plan is limited to 8 lines of code. That kind of pushes the definition of "freemium".

pkrotich
I wish you had a blog detailing your journey! Perhaps I missed it - but would love to learn more about what got you into the project and how you kept going!
saasxyz
wow this is bult by a single man? I am an avid user of this site. I thought it is a VC backed product or something. Neat work. Thanks for building this.

It used to be free without any time limitation. But now it only allows 30 minutes of free usage per day. Is this model actually working?

ianberdin
Thanks for your feedback. Unfortunately this model does not work.
saasxyz
So you are going back to the old model?
synergy20
how is this different from other online editors,e.g.codepen etc
ianberdin
Thanks for the question. First of all it isn't a Pen :)

Codepen is a community first while having a pretty limited and slow editor without NPM modules, multiple files, rich console, etc.

synergy20
so the key here is that you put node.js inside a browser, that anyone can use your platform directly to work in a nodejs system for frontend without local npm installation and node_modules/ hassles?
ianberdin
Absolutely. Zero setup coding environment with result view as you type.
inflam52
Nice work! I wish I would have come across this sooner or I might not have started building https://webden.dev for the past year haha. PLAYCODE is definitely more robust as far as features (courses, virtual file system, pro version, users, node.js, transpiled projects, etc) but it's cool to see your big focus on speed. The rest of the ecosystem felt so heavy and bloated when I originally started looking.

Also, thanks for sharing your story! Very inspiring!

virgil_disgr4ce
Any chance you've open-sourced any of this? I've been looking for a way to run Node.js packages in-browser!
jawns
@ianberdin, there's a link to "Sign up." But it doesn't give a good indication of what signing up does. Does it give me access to additional features? Does it sign me up for marketing emails? Normally at the sign-up stage, users are presented with a Terms of Service link or something else that gives further details, but it looks like you only present this information after the user has entered their info. Would you consider adding something like this up-front so I know what I'm actually signing up for BEFORE I enter my info?
LionTamer
https://playcode.io/pricing might help?
bogwog
The free tier on that page says you get "8 lines of code". Is that a typo? Does the app really not let you write more than 8 lines of code? Of what use is that to anyone?