albertyw/albertyw.com

Tip for Developer Tools Startups

developer-tools-startups

1612065342

I recently had a really annoying experience with a startup in the developer
tools space.  I've been looking for a better CI platform for a while
now (I've used Codeship, CircleCI, Travis, and Jenkins) and I found a promising
CI platform that relied significantly on open source repositories as plugins to
run its build pipelines.  Many of these repositories are owned under the
company's own Github organization.  Onboarding a few repositories of mine
during an initial trial period, I found that there was a major missing feature
in one of these plugins which would block me as well as other users from
using this CI system effectively.  I even found an open Github issue from
another user a year earlier that reported the same missing feature.  I then
went into the plugin, learned the architecture, wrote a patch, added tests and
documentation, and submitted five pull requests to fix this missing feature.

I've been waiting for three weeks for the company to merge or at least comment
on these pull requests.  In the meantime, my two week trial period ended which
means I can't even test changes to my pull requests.  I therefore have
significant doubts whether I should be using this company's products.

Here's a tip for dev tools startups: your customers and yourself are likely
Github users, and if your customers contribute free feedback or features to
your company through Github, you had better be responsive.