Raycast (YC W20) | Fully Remote, UTC timezone (London) ± 3 hours) | Full Time | https://raycast.com
Raycast is a productivity tool for developers that makes it easy to control your tools with simple command bar interface (think of it as macOS Spotlight for developers). We're looking for engineers (macOS and fullstack), developer advocate and a designer to help us with building API platform[1] that will allow everyone to build and publish extensions in Raycast.
For Mac users, who's looking for deeper integration with GitHub, we've built an extension in Raycast [1] that allows you to see pull requests, issues, notifications, workflows, etc. Repository search is also something we're planning to add soon.
Nice, consistent design system and guidance is definitely something we want to have for the future platform. Thanks for pointing out to Shopify Polaris, looks very interesting!
Fair enough! Hopefully it will not become a problem. In the end, it's just the name and we want to be defined by the product and its value rather than by the name itself.
As to why exactly we picked it: as ray casting is a way to instantly query information about closest objects, we thought it would be a good metaphor for instantly querying and accessing different third party services. Rays represent speed and focus.
We want to open it up as soon as possible. The main reason behind the private beta is that integrations such as Jira are fairly complex due to different setups and a lot of customisation so currently we're in the process of "onboard new company -> fix bugs -> try again" and so on. It's getting better on each iteration and as soon it reaches certain level of stability on the integrations side, we're going too open it up to everyone.
Yeah, Linear is a great tool and has an amazing UX, though as you correctly noticed they are building standalone issue tracking tool while we're building an app that sits on top of other web apps allowing you to use them without going to a browser.
Fair point and I absolutely agree, VSCode has some great integrations with other services and in fact solves similar problem of context switching. However there are quite a lot of people that don't use VSCode, not to mention you're not always in your IDE when you need to perform these tasks.
Having said that we want to explore some ideas where we integrate deeper with IDEs like VSCode and provide commands based on the context (e.g. provide documentation search based on the coding language, suggest filing a task for TODO comments, etc).
Good idea! That is definitely something we want to explore in the future (giving a CLI for Raycast integrations on top of main app functionality), especially if people will be asking for this.
Our main differentiator from Alfred is provide much deeper and richer integrations with other services. One of the goals for Raycast is to keep you away from browser that can distract you from work. Also we have a lot of plans for team features that Alfred lacks of. And yeah, there's certainly going to be an overlap :)
As you correctly guessed, we're planning to provide features that would be useful to teams and larger organizations. Shared commands, integrations with custom internal tools, shared instant knowledge base and so on.
Giving ability to build custom commands with underlying scripts is something that we're going to tackle very soon! Do you have any examples for what kind of things you would want to use it for?
Thanks for the feedback. Yeah, it crossed our mind that some people familiar with 3D graphics term might get confused. I really hope that there are not too many people in our target audience familiar with it, though I might be wrong :)
Thanks for the kind words! We've built it ourselves, and to be honest neither of us is a web developer or designer so we're happy that it came together in the end.
Thanks! Sign up for the private beta and we'll send you the build as soon as possible. The main reason for "private beta" mode is to make sure that complex integrations such as Jira work for people. We're onboarding people everyday, catch some errors, patch them and so on.
We have plans to provide API for building custom integrations as soon as we're ready to settle down with the framework. At the moment there's still a lot of experimentation so we're building all integrations ourselves.