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Launch HN: Great Question (YC W21) – Customer research tools for software teams

Hi HN!<p>I’m Ned and along with my co-founder PJ (pjmurraynz) we’re building Great Question (<a href="https://greatquestion.co" rel="nofollow">https://greatquestion.co</a>) to make it easy to do customer research as part of every sprint or product release.<p>The maxim of Y Combinator is “talk to customers, build something people want” yet relatively few software teams regularly engage in customer research. This was definitely the case for us in our last startup, and even when we sold that business to a place with a well resourced research team we were largely on our own. Without any real tools or processes to do customer research we ended up muddling through, but it was always ad hoc - and often skipped so we could just get a release out the door. Bad news.<p>By talking to lots of customers (meta!) we learned that one of the biggest challenges teams face is in the logistics of research: finding customers to talk to, scheduling calls & paying incentives. The research community calls this Research Operations. We’re setting out to fix these problems by building tools that make it easy for small teams to do what companies like Facebook and Google do with massive teams of research coordinators.<p>We help you do better customer research, more often in four ways:<p>First, we help you build an on-demand pool of research subjects. These are customers who opt in to be notified about customer interview requests and surveys, or find out about beta product releases. They could also be customers you find in other forums or communities, through content marketing or direct outreach.<p>Second, we let you book time with a customer in a couple of clicks, or send out a survey or prototype test. We give you templates to save you creating these things from scratch every time, but also to keep you following best practice. Templates like Product Market Fit surveys are live now with more advanced ones like Van Westendorp pricing surveys coming soon (email me for early access).<p>Third, we handle all the messaging on platform to protect the privacy and consent of your users but also to manage what's called "participant fatigue", and handle any incentives to make sure you get the responses you need.<p>Finally, we make it easy to share what you’re learning with your team. Store your notes, observations, video files and transcripts in one place. Post it to Slack, get an email digest of learnings & upcoming interviews, and find previous research reports in one central place.<p>All of this is to say we’re building the tool we wish we had while building product at our last startup, and also in the belly of the beast after we got acquired. The tool that helps you go from having some big gnarly question to start getting answers in minutes, and which brings your team along for the journey. We use the tool religiously in-house and it's had a massive impact on not only our own product development process, but our first engineering hire (ex Twitch) has noted how much more connected he feels with our customers and the product he's building.<p>What do you all think? We’d love your feedback on the product and our approach. In particular we’d love to know how customer research works at your company and the challenges you face making it happen!

Show HN: I built an internet speed analytics tool

Show HN: I built an internet speed analytics tool

Launch HN: Taste (YC W21) – Recreate nice restaurant experiences at home

Launch HN: Taste (YC W21) – Recreate nice restaurant experiences at home

Launch HN: Taste (YC W21) – Recreate nice restaurant experiences at home

Show HN: "100 Page Python Intro" eBook

Show HN: Screenstab – A tool to turn screenshots into image assets

Show HN: Screenstab – A tool to turn screenshots into image assets

Launch HN: Wasp (YC W21) – DSL for building full-stack web apps

Hi HN!<p>We are Martin and Matija, twin brothers and creators of Wasp (<a href="https://wasp-lang.dev" rel="nofollow">https://wasp-lang.dev</a>). Wasp is a declarative language that makes it really easy to build full-stack web apps while still using the latest technologies such as React, Node.js and Prisma.<p>Martin and I both studied computer science where we mostly focused on algorithms for bioinformatics. Afterwards we led engineering teams in several SaaS companies, on the way gaining plenty of experience in building web apps.<p>Moving from one project to another, we used various technologies: JQuery -> Backbone -> Angular -> React, own scripts / makefile -> Grunt -> Gulp -> Webpack, PHP -> Java -> Node.js, … , and we always felt that things are harder than they should be. We were spending a lot of time adopting the latest tech stack and figuring out the best practices: how to make the web app performant, scalable, economical and secure and also how to connect all the pieces of the stack together.<p>While the tech stack kept advancing rapidly, the core requirements of the apps we were building changed very little (auth, routing, data model CRUD, ACL, …). That is why about 1.5 years ago we started thinking about separating web app specification (what it should do) from its implementation (how it should do it).<p>This led us to the idea of extracting common web app features and concepts into a special specification language from which we could generate code in the currently popular technologies. We don’t think it is feasible to replace everything with a single language so that is why we went with a DSL which integrates with the modern stack (right now React, NodeJS, Prisma).<p>Wasp lets you define high-level aspects of your web app (auth, routing, ACL, data models, CRUD) via a simple specification language and then write your specific logic in React and Node.js. The majority of the code is still being written in React and Node.js, with Wasp serving as the backbone of your whole application. To see some examples of what the language looks like in practice, take a look here: <a href="https://github.com/wasp-lang/wasp/blob/master/examples/tutorials/TodoApp/main.wasp" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/wasp-lang/wasp/blob/master/examples/tutor...</a><p>The main difference between Wasp and frameworks (e.g. Meteor, Blitz, Redwood) is that Wasp is a language, not a library. One benefit of that is a simpler and cleaner, declarative syntax, focused on the requirements and detached from the implementation details.<p>Another benefit of a DSL is that it allows Wasp to understand the web app’s requirements during the build time and reason about it before generating the final code. For example, when generating code to be deployed to production, it could pick the most appropriate architecture based on its understanding of the web app and deploy it to serverless or another type of architecture (or even a combination). Another example would be reusing your data model logic through all the parts of the stack while defining it just once in Wasp. DSL opens the potential for optimisations, static analysis and extensibility.<p>Wasp’s compiler is built in Haskell and it compiles the source code in Wasp + React/Node.js into the target code in just React and Node.js (currently in Javascript, but we plan to move to Typescript soon). The generated code is human readable and can easily be inspected and even ejected if Wasp becomes too limiting.<p>We are currently in Alpha and many features are still rough or missing, but you can try it out and build and deploy web apps! There are things we haven’t solved yet and others that will probably change as we progress.<p>You can check out our repo at <a href="https://github.com/wasp-lang/wasp" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/wasp-lang/wasp</a> and give it a try at <a href="https://wasp-lang.dev/docs/" rel="nofollow">https://wasp-lang.dev/docs/</a>.<p>Thank you for reading! We would love to get your feedback and also hear about your experiences building web apps - what has worked for you and where do you see the opportunities for improvement?

Launch HN: Wasp (YC W21) – DSL for building full-stack web apps

Hi HN!<p>We are Martin and Matija, twin brothers and creators of Wasp (<a href="https://wasp-lang.dev" rel="nofollow">https://wasp-lang.dev</a>). Wasp is a declarative language that makes it really easy to build full-stack web apps while still using the latest technologies such as React, Node.js and Prisma.<p>Martin and I both studied computer science where we mostly focused on algorithms for bioinformatics. Afterwards we led engineering teams in several SaaS companies, on the way gaining plenty of experience in building web apps.<p>Moving from one project to another, we used various technologies: JQuery -> Backbone -> Angular -> React, own scripts / makefile -> Grunt -> Gulp -> Webpack, PHP -> Java -> Node.js, … , and we always felt that things are harder than they should be. We were spending a lot of time adopting the latest tech stack and figuring out the best practices: how to make the web app performant, scalable, economical and secure and also how to connect all the pieces of the stack together.<p>While the tech stack kept advancing rapidly, the core requirements of the apps we were building changed very little (auth, routing, data model CRUD, ACL, …). That is why about 1.5 years ago we started thinking about separating web app specification (what it should do) from its implementation (how it should do it).<p>This led us to the idea of extracting common web app features and concepts into a special specification language from which we could generate code in the currently popular technologies. We don’t think it is feasible to replace everything with a single language so that is why we went with a DSL which integrates with the modern stack (right now React, NodeJS, Prisma).<p>Wasp lets you define high-level aspects of your web app (auth, routing, ACL, data models, CRUD) via a simple specification language and then write your specific logic in React and Node.js. The majority of the code is still being written in React and Node.js, with Wasp serving as the backbone of your whole application. To see some examples of what the language looks like in practice, take a look here: <a href="https://github.com/wasp-lang/wasp/blob/master/examples/tutorials/TodoApp/main.wasp" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/wasp-lang/wasp/blob/master/examples/tutor...</a><p>The main difference between Wasp and frameworks (e.g. Meteor, Blitz, Redwood) is that Wasp is a language, not a library. One benefit of that is a simpler and cleaner, declarative syntax, focused on the requirements and detached from the implementation details.<p>Another benefit of a DSL is that it allows Wasp to understand the web app’s requirements during the build time and reason about it before generating the final code. For example, when generating code to be deployed to production, it could pick the most appropriate architecture based on its understanding of the web app and deploy it to serverless or another type of architecture (or even a combination). Another example would be reusing your data model logic through all the parts of the stack while defining it just once in Wasp. DSL opens the potential for optimisations, static analysis and extensibility.<p>Wasp’s compiler is built in Haskell and it compiles the source code in Wasp + React/Node.js into the target code in just React and Node.js (currently in Javascript, but we plan to move to Typescript soon). The generated code is human readable and can easily be inspected and even ejected if Wasp becomes too limiting.<p>We are currently in Alpha and many features are still rough or missing, but you can try it out and build and deploy web apps! There are things we haven’t solved yet and others that will probably change as we progress.<p>You can check out our repo at <a href="https://github.com/wasp-lang/wasp" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/wasp-lang/wasp</a> and give it a try at <a href="https://wasp-lang.dev/docs/" rel="nofollow">https://wasp-lang.dev/docs/</a>.<p>Thank you for reading! We would love to get your feedback and also hear about your experiences building web apps - what has worked for you and where do you see the opportunities for improvement?

Launch HN: Wasp (YC W21) – DSL for building full-stack web apps

Hi HN!<p>We are Martin and Matija, twin brothers and creators of Wasp (<a href="https://wasp-lang.dev" rel="nofollow">https://wasp-lang.dev</a>). Wasp is a declarative language that makes it really easy to build full-stack web apps while still using the latest technologies such as React, Node.js and Prisma.<p>Martin and I both studied computer science where we mostly focused on algorithms for bioinformatics. Afterwards we led engineering teams in several SaaS companies, on the way gaining plenty of experience in building web apps.<p>Moving from one project to another, we used various technologies: JQuery -> Backbone -> Angular -> React, own scripts / makefile -> Grunt -> Gulp -> Webpack, PHP -> Java -> Node.js, … , and we always felt that things are harder than they should be. We were spending a lot of time adopting the latest tech stack and figuring out the best practices: how to make the web app performant, scalable, economical and secure and also how to connect all the pieces of the stack together.<p>While the tech stack kept advancing rapidly, the core requirements of the apps we were building changed very little (auth, routing, data model CRUD, ACL, …). That is why about 1.5 years ago we started thinking about separating web app specification (what it should do) from its implementation (how it should do it).<p>This led us to the idea of extracting common web app features and concepts into a special specification language from which we could generate code in the currently popular technologies. We don’t think it is feasible to replace everything with a single language so that is why we went with a DSL which integrates with the modern stack (right now React, NodeJS, Prisma).<p>Wasp lets you define high-level aspects of your web app (auth, routing, ACL, data models, CRUD) via a simple specification language and then write your specific logic in React and Node.js. The majority of the code is still being written in React and Node.js, with Wasp serving as the backbone of your whole application. To see some examples of what the language looks like in practice, take a look here: <a href="https://github.com/wasp-lang/wasp/blob/master/examples/tutorials/TodoApp/main.wasp" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/wasp-lang/wasp/blob/master/examples/tutor...</a><p>The main difference between Wasp and frameworks (e.g. Meteor, Blitz, Redwood) is that Wasp is a language, not a library. One benefit of that is a simpler and cleaner, declarative syntax, focused on the requirements and detached from the implementation details.<p>Another benefit of a DSL is that it allows Wasp to understand the web app’s requirements during the build time and reason about it before generating the final code. For example, when generating code to be deployed to production, it could pick the most appropriate architecture based on its understanding of the web app and deploy it to serverless or another type of architecture (or even a combination). Another example would be reusing your data model logic through all the parts of the stack while defining it just once in Wasp. DSL opens the potential for optimisations, static analysis and extensibility.<p>Wasp’s compiler is built in Haskell and it compiles the source code in Wasp + React/Node.js into the target code in just React and Node.js (currently in Javascript, but we plan to move to Typescript soon). The generated code is human readable and can easily be inspected and even ejected if Wasp becomes too limiting.<p>We are currently in Alpha and many features are still rough or missing, but you can try it out and build and deploy web apps! There are things we haven’t solved yet and others that will probably change as we progress.<p>You can check out our repo at <a href="https://github.com/wasp-lang/wasp" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/wasp-lang/wasp</a> and give it a try at <a href="https://wasp-lang.dev/docs/" rel="nofollow">https://wasp-lang.dev/docs/</a>.<p>Thank you for reading! We would love to get your feedback and also hear about your experiences building web apps - what has worked for you and where do you see the opportunities for improvement?

Launch HN: Wasp (YC W21) – DSL for building full-stack web apps

Hi HN!<p>We are Martin and Matija, twin brothers and creators of Wasp (<a href="https://wasp-lang.dev" rel="nofollow">https://wasp-lang.dev</a>). Wasp is a declarative language that makes it really easy to build full-stack web apps while still using the latest technologies such as React, Node.js and Prisma.<p>Martin and I both studied computer science where we mostly focused on algorithms for bioinformatics. Afterwards we led engineering teams in several SaaS companies, on the way gaining plenty of experience in building web apps.<p>Moving from one project to another, we used various technologies: JQuery -> Backbone -> Angular -> React, own scripts / makefile -> Grunt -> Gulp -> Webpack, PHP -> Java -> Node.js, … , and we always felt that things are harder than they should be. We were spending a lot of time adopting the latest tech stack and figuring out the best practices: how to make the web app performant, scalable, economical and secure and also how to connect all the pieces of the stack together.<p>While the tech stack kept advancing rapidly, the core requirements of the apps we were building changed very little (auth, routing, data model CRUD, ACL, …). That is why about 1.5 years ago we started thinking about separating web app specification (what it should do) from its implementation (how it should do it).<p>This led us to the idea of extracting common web app features and concepts into a special specification language from which we could generate code in the currently popular technologies. We don’t think it is feasible to replace everything with a single language so that is why we went with a DSL which integrates with the modern stack (right now React, NodeJS, Prisma).<p>Wasp lets you define high-level aspects of your web app (auth, routing, ACL, data models, CRUD) via a simple specification language and then write your specific logic in React and Node.js. The majority of the code is still being written in React and Node.js, with Wasp serving as the backbone of your whole application. To see some examples of what the language looks like in practice, take a look here: <a href="https://github.com/wasp-lang/wasp/blob/master/examples/tutorials/TodoApp/main.wasp" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/wasp-lang/wasp/blob/master/examples/tutor...</a><p>The main difference between Wasp and frameworks (e.g. Meteor, Blitz, Redwood) is that Wasp is a language, not a library. One benefit of that is a simpler and cleaner, declarative syntax, focused on the requirements and detached from the implementation details.<p>Another benefit of a DSL is that it allows Wasp to understand the web app’s requirements during the build time and reason about it before generating the final code. For example, when generating code to be deployed to production, it could pick the most appropriate architecture based on its understanding of the web app and deploy it to serverless or another type of architecture (or even a combination). Another example would be reusing your data model logic through all the parts of the stack while defining it just once in Wasp. DSL opens the potential for optimisations, static analysis and extensibility.<p>Wasp’s compiler is built in Haskell and it compiles the source code in Wasp + React/Node.js into the target code in just React and Node.js (currently in Javascript, but we plan to move to Typescript soon). The generated code is human readable and can easily be inspected and even ejected if Wasp becomes too limiting.<p>We are currently in Alpha and many features are still rough or missing, but you can try it out and build and deploy web apps! There are things we haven’t solved yet and others that will probably change as we progress.<p>You can check out our repo at <a href="https://github.com/wasp-lang/wasp" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/wasp-lang/wasp</a> and give it a try at <a href="https://wasp-lang.dev/docs/" rel="nofollow">https://wasp-lang.dev/docs/</a>.<p>Thank you for reading! We would love to get your feedback and also hear about your experiences building web apps - what has worked for you and where do you see the opportunities for improvement?

Show HN: I wrote an entire book to build a mouseless dev environment

Show HN: I wrote an entire book to build a mouseless dev environment

Show HN: I wrote an entire book to build a mouseless dev environment

Show HN: A fast JSON library for Go

Show HN: A fast JSON library for Go

Launch HN: Jiga (YC W21) – Faster custom parts for hardware products

Hi HN! It's Assaf and I'm the co-founder of Jiga (<a href="https://app.jiga3d.com" rel="nofollow">https://app.jiga3d.com</a>). We make it fast and easy to produce parts for hardware products.<p>You can upload a 3D model (such as STL or SLDPRT) file and get a production quote within seconds. We have a vetted network of manufacturers around the world who can produce your part with 3D printing (plastic and metal), CNC machining (plastic and metal), or sheet metal. It's literally 3 clicks: 1. upload your file on <a href="https://app.jiga3d.com" rel="nofollow">https://app.jiga3d.com</a>. 2. select manufacturing process 3. select quote and order.<p>We built this because we are hardware makers ourselves. I was running a 3D printing manufacturing service before starting Jiga, and we were shocked by how bad an experience it was to get quotes and order parts online, or from machine shops. I spent a significant amount of my time and money on inefficient communication, paperwork, sourcing and quoting.<p>Ok, so now you're probably asking how we're different from other online manufacturing companies? Well, besides being not as fast, they act as an unnecessary middleman. They cut a huge fee, block hardware builders from talking directly to manufacturers and getting professional feedback (such as making sure they can produce that 0.15mm tolerance exactly on that little hole).<p>For examples, take some of our customers: an enterprise that builds jets for the US army, a company that builds a device that enables tractors to be autonomous, a hospital that builds 3D printed ventilation machines to tackle Covid-19 (first parts ordered with Jiga!) or a company that builds robotic arms.<p>These companies start by looking for the right supplier to make their part. They email quote requests with the designs, some suppliers reply after a week, some don’t. They log this data into spreadsheets and folders while making comparisons. Finally after two weeks the supplier is ready to take your order but oh no! They mixed up the email threads and made a mistake - and the wrong part was produced.<p>Worse, when getting into producing more than just prototypes, they have to manage the supply of many different components and timelines, making sure that that they won’t find themselves delaying over some little component and avoiding any miscommunication about parts or revisions. All this inefficiency is not only frustrating but also costly - makers and companies lose millions every year because of miscommunication and delays. We built Jiga to make this process efficient and painless.<p>We handle all logistics (always first class/priority shipping) and make sure that customers are 100% happy with every order that they get. Additionally, we let you read supplier reviews, check their certifications and communicate directly with them. Want to make sure that the supplier is aware of that 0.15mm hole? No problem, reach to them over our platform and they will answer promptly.<p>We make money from commissions on orders based on agreements with suppliers.<p>I’m looking forward to talking to anyone who builds hardware, and to hearing your feedback and ideas and experiences in this space. If you've ever needed parts for things you were making, I hope you'll give us a spin. Have at it, HN!

Launch HN: SigNoz (YC W21) – Open-source alternative to DataDog

Hi HN,<p>Pranay and Ankit here. We’re founders of SigNoz ( <a href="https://signoz.io" rel="nofollow">https://signoz.io</a> ), an open source observability platform. We are building an open-core alternative to DataDog for companies that are security and privacy conscious, and are concerned about huge bills they need to pay to SaaS observability vendors.<p>Observability means being able to monitor your application components - from mobile and web front-ends to infrastructure, and being able to ask questions about their states. Things like latency, error rates, RPS, etc. Better observability helps developers find the cause of issues in their deployed software and solve them quickly.<p>Ankit was leading an engineering team, where we became aware of the importance of observability in a microservices system where each service depended on the health of multiple other services. And we saw that this problem was getting more and more important, esp. in today’s world of distributed systems.<p>The journey of SigNoz started with our own pain point. I was working in a startup in India. We didn’t use application monitoring (APM) tools like DataDog/NewRelic as it was very costly, though we badly needed it. We had many customers complaining about broken APIs or a payment not processing - and we had to get into war room mode to solve it. Having a good observability system would have allowed us to solve these issues much more quickly.<p>Not having any solution which met our needs, we set out to do something about this.<p>In our initial exploration, we tried setting up RED (Rate, Error and Duration) and infra metrics using Prometheus. But we soon realized that metrics can only give you an aggregate overview of systems. You need to debug why these metrics went haywire. This led us to explore Jaeger, an open source distributed tracing system.<p>Key issues with Jaeger were that there was no concept of metrics in Jaegers, and datastores supported by Jaeger lacked aggregation capabilities. For example, if you had tags of “customer_type: premium” for your premium customers, you couldn’t find p99 latency experienced by them through Jaeger.<p>We found that though there are many backend products - an open source product with UI custom-built for observability, which integrates metrics & traces, was missing.<p>Also, some folks we talked to expressed concern about sending data outside of boundaries - and we felt that with increasing privacy regulations, this would become more critical. We thought there was scope for an open source solution that addresses these points.<p>We think that currently there is a huge gap between the state of SaaS APM products and OSS products. There is a scope for open core products which is open source but also supports enterprise scale and comes with support and advanced features.<p>Some of our key features - (1) Seamless UI to track metrics and traces (2) Ability to get metrics for business-relevant queries, e.g. latency faced by premium customers (3) Aggregates on filtered traces, etc.<p>We plan to focus next on building native alert managers, support for custom metrics and then logs ( waiting for open telemetry logs to mature more in this). More details about our roadmap here ( <a href="https://signoz.io/docs/roadmap" rel="nofollow">https://signoz.io/docs/roadmap</a> )<p>We are based on Golang & React. The design of SigNoz is inspired by streaming data architecture. Data is ingested to Kafka and relevant info & meta-data is extracted by stream processing. Any number of processors can be built as per business needs. Processed data is ingested to real-time analytics datastore, Apache Druid, which powers aggregates on slicing and dicing of high dimensional data. In the initial benchmarks we did for self-hosting SigNoz, we found that it would be 10x more cost-effective than SaaS vendors ( <a href="https://signoz.io/blog/signoz-benchmarks/" rel="nofollow">https://signoz.io/blog/signoz-benchmarks/</a> )<p>We’ve launched this repo under MIT license so any developer can use the tool. The goal is to not charge individual developers & small teams. We eventually plan on making a licensed version where we charge for features that large companies care about like advanced security, single sign-on, advanced integrations and support.<p>You can check out our repo at <a href="https://github.com/SigNoz/signoz" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/SigNoz/signoz</a> We have a ton of features in mind and would love you to try it and let us know your feedback!