Use your imagination — could you describe a product which could make your life easier, but doesn't exist, or has not yet become practical?
This is the third post of the Mayfield + DEV Discussion series. Please feel free to go back and answer previous questions as well.
Latest comments (75)
A consolidated parameter store manager - that knows to deploy parameters between regions/clouds/parameter stores, and sync them.
Visual Programming Tool that is accessible to all for learning professional programming. When a student at engineering school I suffered from that until teacher shows us a visual method called grafcet. So I'm now inspiring roughly from it to create a tool for same purpose because for decades I've tried all that existed they're just not scalable.
Here's a glimpse
Grammarly? I could never write well so having it helps to solve a lot of communication issues in my docs or when discussing or chatting with ppl.
Focus-follows-eyes.
Just about every GUI these days uses click-to-focus. Another popular alternative, in the X11 world, is focus-follows-mouse.
I want an intelligent focus-follows-eyes so that if I look at a different editor window and then start typing, my input goes where I want it to and not into whichever window previously had focus.
Naming a Variable Tool
Flicking through responses so far, I tend to concur with many that more tools is not what I need, nor do I feel any springing to mind as needed. But given I do love FOSS and I contribute to it a little in my spare time as and when I need something that isn't there my main desire in terms of products/tools would be anything at all, that makes the process of creating and submitting PRs (Pull Requests, a fancy git era term for a submitted code contribution or patch) simpler, more discoverable and intuitive and streamlined is a big thing I'd like to see.
This part of a broader wish to see community collaboration improve even more. It has seen unprecedented advances in the last decade, but I think is still one of the areas in need of attention to lower the barriers in a sense.
For example, if all IDEs started to converge on a standard open project definition format and build and publish formats ... that would already be a boon. The biggest issue I see in the world around me, I have seen repeatedly described by like-minded individuals as Forking F-in forking!
That essentially every part of the development cycle is dominated by a disorienting and challenging number of options confronted every step of the way, and if you look at n projects you find a call to learn a handful of different tools every step of the way etc.
And so perhaps the biggest product I would like to see existing is "more standardisation". It requires flexible standards, but more than that, it requires competing tool sets to start thinking about conformance to one another bit by bit. A pipe dream, I know. But I dream. And I have seen standards emerge. Browsers are a case in point ... the divergence between them has shrunk to inconsequence. It is doable. We need to share the vision broadly, though ;-).
The mantra being: lower entry barriers, leverage familiarity.
For Git and GitHub specifically, tools like git-town and GitHub's gh (the successor to hub) have short commands for creating PR's. I'm not sure anything addresses making PR's more discoverable. Not sure what you mean by more intuitive, though I agree there's a moderate learning curve to using PR's.
Reminds me of youtube.com/watch?v=Y9ttBt-4vWo !
Robust refactoring tools for C++, comparable to the refactoring tools available for Java or C#.
(I understand why we don't have them, and can't have them. I'm just saying they should exist.)
Though it should be remembered that the very first refactoring tool was written in and for Smalltalk, a quite dynamic language. Sure, C++ is messier, but probably some progress can be made. Truly robust refactoring, as you say, is probably infeasible, though.
I've been thinking a lot about this problem myself lately.
Of course, my imagined solution is yet another piece of software. And I can't entirely articulate it, but come back some time in the future to see if I ever do anything with this idea. 😅
Carry on.
In aviation they use visual programming and generate c code so that's what I'm doing too but pragmatically I also allow 2 ways see prototype in my first comment , demo is html+css but it is meant to be completely language and framework agnostic ie skeleton is separated from the meat ;)
A line of code that CAN be linked to a Notion document.