Show HN: Watermelon – open-source VSC ext. to document code and view Git blame

https://github.com/watermelontools/wm-extension

by baristaGeek • 4 years ago

84 42 4 years ago

Hey there HN! We're a pair of devs looking to get feedback for our open-source project.

We're remote engineers who have contracted for many clients overseas. There's a problem that all codebases share: Onboarding devs to a new codebase is hard no matter what.

We're also open-source engineers and learned about the techniques used in OSS to tackle the problem. Please give us your feedback.

Homepage: https://watermelon.tools/

Repo: https://github.com/watermelontools/wm-extension

Install: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Watermel...

estebandalelr3• 4 years ago

Hey! Esteban, the CTO of watermelon here. Feel free to ask any questions, open to answering them :)

sebmellen3• 4 years ago

So many Estebans…

jgarzonebrath• 4 years ago

This concept is very cool. Interesting approach to visualize git blame and the team behind looks outstanding. Congrats guys, downloaded.

baristaGeek15• 4 years ago

Ty very much! We're glad we're adding value.

oarojas• 4 years ago

Love the open-source approach. Congrats! Great product

baristaGeek15• 4 years ago

Ty! This has been an important pillar for us since day 1. We believe a lot in the open source ethos, its transparency, and its collaborativeness.

alan_arguello3• 4 years ago

Amazing concept! I have been following the process and I'm really excited to see what you guys accomplish. Congrats!

baristaGeek15• 4 years ago

Ty Alan! It's great to be surrounded by smart technical people like you.

nicorojas9• 4 years ago

Hey, congrats on the open source approach! I do have a question on your strategy though. How do you get valuable feedback from users? What incentive does your users have in order to communicate with you back and forth trying to build a better product?

baristaGeek15• 4 years ago

Ty! Open source is a very important part of our philosophy.

1. We track which GitHub usernames and repos that use Watermelon, it's the only thing we track. This allows us to go to people and ask them for more detailed feedback. We also get feedback from stargazers and forkers. Because we're open source, people also leave GH issues.

2. The incentive is something very basic: They wanna see a better version of this out there in the world.

no_circuit2• 4 years ago

According to the repo it is more than just username and repo, the local user account and email address is also tracked [1]. I'd argue that you shouldn't be recording email since that is PII. And repo name and repo owner since the names could be considered trade secrets within organizations. Recording the local user account could be considered sensitive information since it could aid hacking the organization. Finally I don't think you should be recording the GitHub username as well since usage patterns could be analyzed to determine the timezone of the user, which is also considered sensitive personal information in some large corporations that track user behavior data.

Sorry, but I don't think you should request feedback from users without their explicit permission. Isn't there a feedback mechanism built into VSCode already, or make and affordance for one in your plugin UI? Maybe at best generate a random install ID that can be reset for analytics and session tracking? VSCode has guidelines for this, see [2].

[1] https://github.com/watermelontools/wm-extension/blob/c389125...

[2] https://code.visualstudio.com/api/extension-guides/telemetry...

igomeza• 4 years ago

Used it some weeks ago to understand a package in the kubernetes codebase. Its great for getting insights on an unfamiliar project

baristaGeek15• 4 years ago

Thanks! If you have any suggestions for us please open up an issue on our repo.

revenga99• 4 years ago

Curious why it is named watermelon.

baristaGeek15• 4 years ago

It's the happiest fruit and has emoji :)

Loic2• 4 years ago

nicorojas9, alan_arguello, jgarzonebrath and oarojas were all accounts which are between 2 year and 90 day old without any comments.

Suddenly they decided to comment for the first time on this specific submission.

And all within one hour.

And all to basically write the same thing.

The Watermelon authors are lucky or maybe it is Friday the 13th.

baristaGeek15• 4 years ago

Wow this Sherlock Holmes-level research.

Our close friends did notice we launched. Lol.

melissalobos• 4 years ago

Wow this Sherlock Holmes-level research.

It isn't very hard to click on the usernames after you see some suspicious messaging from similar accounts.

alan_arguello3• 4 years ago

Always happy to verify my identity Loic.

I saw that Watermelon was on HN and I did made a first comment, because I have been following the project and I like to support other founders who happen to be my friends.

And indeed, they are "lucky" to have people that like the team and project. Hope that it is the same case with you and people that you know :).

Loic2• 4 years ago

Then, as a good friend, take the time to provide a comment with more insights. We will all benefit from them. I looked at the comments because the website has not a lot of information and I was expecting to learn more from the comments.

Note: This is the first time I looked at the origins of comments in a submission because they really looked like fake comments and this annoyed me terribly as I want HN to stay free of them.

sebmellen3• 4 years ago

Hey Esteban, it’s Sebastian. Huge congrats on your HackerNews launch!!!

I had the pleasure of working with Esteban (aka baristaGeek) at Cerebrum. Great guy. There’s a saying that the best employees go on to be founders, and I can definitely see that in what Watermelon is becoming. Very exciting!

And yes! The code onboarding problem is always there. Watermelon providing that historical context is huge.

P.S. I just happened to find this at the bottom of the homepage. I had no idea Esteban would be posting here, I just browse HN a lot.

baristaGeek15• 4 years ago

Ty Sebastian! Yeah, Cerebrum was an awesome school.

Hope we're adding value with our historical context tool. Always glad to listen to your feedback.

estebandalelr3• 4 years ago

Haha! "The other Esteban" here. Thanks for the comment, we've been hard at work. Hope to see you again soon!

a-dub2• 4 years ago

super cool! have long been interested in tooling for making code archaeology easier!

any plans for building extensions for various issue/work tracking systems, wikis, email archives, etc? i've longed for comprehensive views across tickets, pull requests, bug reports and wikis for all relevant knowledge for a given effort in past.

sebmellen3• 4 years ago

It looks like integration with ticketing systems is on the roadmap https://github.com/orgs/watermelontools/projects/1.

baristaGeek15• 4 years ago

Yes! We're exploring Jira, and Notion integrations mostly. We're discarding Slack for the moment because of the technical feasibility, but would be something we look further down the road.

What's your opinion about the create docs direction we're exploring to complement your Indiana Jones coding? (Love your "code archeology" term).

a-dub2• 4 years ago

that is less interesting to me personally as that's often handled locally. (most sites with many projects will have some sort of locally customized project boilerplate or template to start with).

i'm more interested in tooling that gives as much context as possible for why something is the way it is. code ages like a novel would as passed through the telephone game. the more context that is readily available for each generation of changes, the more consistent the design remains in the long run.

also, it's incredibly handy when in emergency breakfix situations.

miguelmichelson• 4 years ago

I've been following Esteban's project recently, I like the product very much it's really handy to give context on what we do on daily basis (coding in my case :D). Build in the open is the way to go, best of lucks to the watermelon team!

baristaGeek15• 4 years ago

Ty! Yeah we're an open company (open source, open roadmap, open salaries) and it has worked great.

alexrecouso• 4 years ago

I've been following this project for so long, super cool to see you guys here!

baristaGeek15• 4 years ago

Ty! Always looking to learn about new ways to add value to you

sanketc• 4 years ago

Love this! If you can pull in info from Slack/Discord convos that would be a big unlock. Do you plan to make this available to private repos shortly? Would love to try it out on an internal one, as we always find ourselves repeating information when onboarding new team members.

baristaGeek15• 4 years ago

Hi there and Ty!

1. We are already available for private repos. If you authenticate you’ll be able to use us on any GH private repo

2. Yes! We’re exploring integrating Notion, Jira, and Slack. Stay tuned!

Kalmis2• 4 years ago

I wonder what are the future plans and features of Watermelon? Currently it feels like it does not bring a lot, or any, new things to VS Code ecosystem.

- GitLens is the extension every Git user should have installed, and it for example automatically gives you the git blame on every line

Then depending a bit on the version control system & language used, there are "native" extension for PR and documentation.

- Github pull requests & issues integrates nicely with the GitLens blame - hover the blame and you'll see the PR. Also has bunch of PR & Issues related functionalities

- autoDocstring (Python) for generating documentation "automatically" inside the code, where it belongs IMHO.

baristaGeek15• 4 years ago

Hi and Ty for your comment. This is exactly the kinds of questions that we wanna see here because we learn new things with such.

1. GitLens is useful but it only gives you the author of a line, and the commit message. We can do way better than that as we keep indexing info from more sources + organize it in different ways

2. Similar as number 1. We will index info from more sources and organize it better.

3. Didn’t know about autoDocstring but it looks like a great analogous tool to JSDoc. We’ve used JS Doc and think it’s great for documenting functions. However, we believe there is an opportunity for documenting greater level stuff such as the architecture and the relations between modules.

Kalmis2• 4 years ago

Sounds good, keep up the good work!

Show HN: Watermelon – open-source VSC ext. to document code and view Git blame

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