Why does the JavaScript ecosystem pride itself in not having a framework? That’s the very thing that drove me out of the ecosystem. JavaScript was my first professional language of focus and I was in love with the growth oriented mentality as a younger engineer, but the part that irked me was that I had to constantly be rebuilding the same set of patterns with different tooling, which is the special choose your own adventure hell that is the JS ecosystem.
I left it for elixir and Phoenix and never looked back. There’s just no true ownership and direction that can come close to that of Jose Valim and Chris McCord in the JS ecosystem. It’s so fragmented that it takes the fun out of maintaining a JS codebase.
I came here thinking that there would be more comments discussing this. This seems like the wrong direction to go for fixing the comfort problem. Tilting your wrists down like that is not proper typing posture.
It’s a tool that leverages your drm free ebooks to help manage your book clubs. The epub file offers more rich info such as:
- word counts per reading
- chapter selection
- the ability to highlight sections and share
- ai summarization and spoiler free discussion about the contents of a given reading
I use it for my own book club right now. I doubt I’ll be able to monetize the app due to the need for drm free epubs which is a pretty high barrier for entry to most non-technical users.
My long term plans would be to have an agent help readers learn hand in hand while reading. I’d like to have the agent facilitate deeper analysis by prompting the users and clubs with questions that encourage more critical analysis of each section. I’ve been building all the infrastructure for running the club so that’s the next more interesting step I haven’t explored yet.
That's not the only reason I was using the tooling at the time. Specifically everything else regarding the JetBrains ecosystem kept me hooked, but when I was looking to replace what I liked in JetBrains with other tooling the last piece of the puzzle was replacing the git workflow.
Remember this type of comment. Never let yourself fall into this type of thinking when trying to understand what your users want.
Instead of passing judgement on why someone values something, why not ask?
For example, if you were to ask me why I chose to keep using an IDE that I had spent years of my life building muscle memory using perhaps you would get a better understanding of the specific part of the lifecycle I was at when paying for software.
It's not that the git gui was the reason why I signed up for the software in the first place. The git gui was the last reason for me to not jump ship when switching to something like neovim or helix. This was during a time where LSP was becoming popular so refactoring tools and intellisense were finally getting better adoption outside of the JetBrains tooling. Most of this was achievable with editor du jour + lsp plugins, but the git ui was the one piece I hadn't personally solved outside of the JetBrains ecosystem.
The commit workflow was what kept me locked in to the ecosystem for so long. LazyGit was so good that it convinced me I didn’t need JetBrains anymore. If you love the workflow with JB for commits check out LazyGit. It’s a TUI so you can use it in any editor without much friction.
I’ve been a JetBrains toolbox subscriber for over a decade. I used to run trainings for new hires to get them up to speed on the eco system as our team would provide licenses. I say all of this because I was about as fanboy as you could get for them.
They’ve dropped the ball over the past five years. Part of me thinks it was the war in Ukraine that did them in. The quality of tooling and the investment in Fleet and AI slop was the death nell for me. I was slated to renew at the grandfathered price on the 17th and decided to let my subscription lapse this year because the value prop just isn’t strong enough anymore.