DEV Community: Sam

Dokploy is such a breath of fresh air in the overcrowded cloud hosting space. perfect for small projects that don't need the scale up-front.

Sam — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 09:24:22 +0000

Build it and they won't come.

Sam — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 19:55:35 +0000

As a solo builder it's so easy to come up with an idea and fall straight into the trap of building first without talking to your target market, we foolishly assume that if we build it the users will come. I've made this mistake several times because building comes naturally to me and talking to people doesn't. Heck I'm making the same mistake right now.

A lot of people are scared that if they talk to people about their idea to try and gauge worth, they'll steal their idea and get Zucked. The Reality is people are lazy. Really lazy! most people would rather go home eat food and watch TV, there's very few people that are going to steal your idea and even less that have put enough thought into it as you have. Don't be afraid, get out there and talk to users.

The other hard part about talking to people is finding people to talk to about your idea. break it down into steps, the first thing to figure out is who is your user and where do they congregate? If you can answer those questions, then you can figure out how to start a dialog with them. Remember your targeting the early adopters, most people in your target audience are likely to be uninterested, you want to find the ones that are leaders and excited about doing something that no-one else doing yet.

Remember that marketing is the majority of the work, the best product doesn't always win out, chances are the better marketed one does. For those of us who are builders, this is really hard. Building isn't the "work", Marketing is.

Prompt analytics without the complexity (or vendor lock-in)

Sam — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 13:45:56 +0000

Over summer, while on parental leave, I looked at all the LLM prompt management platforms to see what might have worked for a previous project at work, where we just stored prompts in a file in the repo. Not great.

I came away with two findings:

The platforms are either way too complicated.
Or they lock you into using their own LLMs rather than the latest ones from OpenAI, Google, etc.

Neither of these is a compromise I am willing to make when choosing a prompt and analytics platform, I need something that doesn't force me into a single model and is quick to get started with.

So I spent my somewhat limited free time whilst on parental leave building out a prompt management and testing platform that focuses only on 2 principles:

how can I compare prompts to find the most effective for my goal.
how can I do the above in the most simple way possible, shielding users from statistic overload

The Answer

Testune is a simple LLM platform to manage and compare prompts. Three things make it practical:

Minimal API. Just three endpoints: create-thread, send-message, rate-message. Nothing else to learn.
Bring your own keys. You control spend and can switch providers at will. Tokens never leave your account.
Analytics done for you. Feedback is aggregated with internal LLM metrics to show which prompt performs better. Straight to the point, no analytical burden.

Check out my project here. Free for dev.to readers, no credit card required. I’d love your feedback, use the internal feedback tool or drop a comment below.