Ask HN: Am I living in a parallel universe to think my idea is super awesome?
So I thought one day while searching for some code snippet on the web (because that's what developers do), how cool it would be to have a website where for a particular problem I can see a list of various implementations in one place. And the code snippets are already validated with test cases and I can try them online to see if it suits my purpose.
I tried searching for such a website. Nothing found.
"I can make this and its an awesome idea" I said to myself.
"I need to be careful, all the traffic I would get would overload my server" the naive self said.
So a few a weeks later I deployed a first version, initially for c#
http://volatileread.com/UtilityLibrary?id=1083
And then I waited..... And waited.. No users.. Shared the link on HN.. Din't even make it to the first page. Opened Analytics, saw 10 sessions. Digged deeper, they were all from me.
Is something wrong with me to still think this is an awesome idea?
20 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 51.7 ms ] threadSee also, StackOverflow. How is your site different from that (except for being more focused)?
My immediate reaction to your implementation:
- C# is icky.
- Would be cool to automatically compare performance of solutions, e.g. timing, memory footprint, etc.
- "Run" button doesn't appear to provide any output?
When I had this idea, I also wanted to be able to provide sample inputs and outputs, and have all potentially matching functions run, to see if any match.
In general, you've hit the problem of building a community without an actual community magically appearing. Keep at it.
[CS1501] No overload for method 'TestCase_0710c06f5bfa4a9b9b44678df9dd933e' takes 0 arguments
Again, I'd say keep at it, and try adding a lot more content. Hell, I wonder if this is something you could even hire random CS students to add content to.
Your opinion, and adds nothing to the discussion.
Your idea is good. You need to figure out how to incentivize users to submit code.
1. Get a catchy name, like Snippr.com.
2. Setup categories for different programming languages.
3. Write code snippets for the most common functions people are looking to find. For example, visit Google and type... 'PHP how to', and you'll see frequent search terms, people wondering how to connect to a MySQL database, how to send an e-mail, how to upload a file, how to get the current URL, how to redirect to another page. People are looking for these answers, and they're easy to write. You can write hundreds of these snippets in a day and start building content.
4. SEO. Right now your links are http://volatileread.com/UtilityLibrary?id=1084. They should be http://snippr.com/php/how-to-get-the-current-url.
With that being said, I don't think it'll work. People don't open their browser and visit a site of code snippets. Instead, they have a problem, and they search Google for the answer. Showing up on the first page of Google for these common terms is not an easy task. You're competing with successful sites that have existed for the better part of a decade. I honestly don't think you'll be able to outrank them, and therefore you'll receive little to no organic traffic, and that's the traffic your site will rely on.
Build this into a collaborative desktop app instead. I'd much rather have an incredible UX built on top of code snippets I can drag out into my IDE.
I think this already exists; I've used something similar, but the UX and searching was poor, and their was no collaboration.
You'd have to nail the indexing.
You should also learn about online marketing. Having a great product isn't enough to get traffic. I don't want to be offensive but your product isn't even very awesome.
- Microsoft built this as well, it's called Bing Code Search: https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/a1166718-a2d9.... It fetches popular snippets from StackOverflow and it should come with nice integration in Visual Studio, but unfortunately it doesn't work for me. I don't know what they're doing with the project but it seems they abandoned it.
- I never heard of your project. I can't use it if I don't know about it.
- It's probably too much of a hassle to search for your site and then search for a snippet. I'm better off just searching for the snippet on Google, much faster. StackOverflow usually provides multiple different ways to solve a problem.
- You don't want people to submit their snippets to your site. Too much effort, won't work. Just get the data from stackoverflow if you're going to pursue this idea.
- How will you make money? Or isn't that your goal?
Making money is secondary, I just need to cover the server costs.
You need to translate your goals into KPIs and optimize for those.
That being said, I think your idea would be incredibly amazing if it offered some kind of IDE integration. I believe Visual Studio had something similar a few years ago, but I don't believe it ever caught traction. Maybe worth it to research and see why it didn't work, and how you can improve on that.
From my perspective it would be amazing to read discussions about code, and get the most used (upvoted) snippet into my code, without ever leaving my IDE.