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Comment by talolard | Hacker News Reader

I made a dev tool into a small business. Came hear to rant: invest in ui upfront. At the end, customers visit your site and you have very little time to make them go wow. Your spending a lot of attention capital when you don’t have much

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Thanks for the advice. You make a very valid point. The first version of Lowdefy had a UI, then every time we wanted to make a schema improvement we also had the tech debt of adapting the UI. As a result the schema became secondary and more and more become unreadable.

So then we really asked how lean can we make this platform to keep it agile while experimenting with the mechanics of the schema. After more than a year of that the experimentation paid off and we now have a very flexible, yet understandable schema for building apps.

But yes. Adding a visual editor on top is one of our goals - and we are getting closer and closer to making it happen.

Can you elaborate on what type of devtool you built?

I'm founder of a startup that develops DevOps tooling and we're debating how early to build out the ui. (We have the basics down with Vue like I mentioned.)

I can't speak for the GP, but I personally find editing code in my IDE to be a smoother and more productive process than editing any type of serialization or markup format like YAML (or JSON, or RON, or EDN to a bit lesser extent). This is most likely due to me being so used to being on the other side of those formats, or generating them with code in the first place, and not necessarily because one is "better." My IDE setups will reflect that preference, which in turn makes it stronger.

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