Show HN: Hetchr, a Developer's Homepage | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Hetchr, a Developer's Homepage

hetchr.com

57 pointswtbauer2027 comments

OP here. Here’s a quick summary about what we’re building:

We centralize the main features of your everyday tools (PRs, CI, Kanban tasks) and build a live feed of everything happening within your development teams. Essentially, we aggregate a "quick view" of your team's development status and give you a way to manage tasks directly from our platform.

We just opened up beta testing and anyone can create an account here. We're still quite early, so it takes about 10 minutes to get your tools connected: https://preview.hetchr.com/signup

Currently, we have integrated Github Issues, Github Pull Requests, Jira, and two native Hetchr ATOMs. Next on the list are CircleCI / Github Actions / Jenkins.

Some additional notes if you'd like to try it out:

- The only data we permanently store is your name, email, and authentication credential. While using Hetchr, we only collect and store locally the data necessary to display your workspace. For Jira, we access/store your project's configurations and the issues. For Github, we access/store your Issues and Pull Requests' comments (not the code). You can delete your account and any associated data in the setting section.

- In order to install our Jira ATOM, you must be the Jira administrator and in order to install our Github ATOMs, you must be the repo owner.

Thanks for taking a look! I’d love to hear your thoughts and I’m happy to answer questions.

Here's our Slack group if you’d prefer to chat directly:

https://join.slack.com/t/hetchr/shared_invite/zt-dkdiysva-Yt...

I've guessed at that summary from the screenshots. I would've much appreciated it if you told me somewhere in the first three pages of low information density graphics I scrolled through.

This misses how your audience works - pretty much every engineer would like to have the meat of the answer served first, and then you add the screenshots for corporate sales.

So, thanks for explaining it here, and maybe consider adding it to the main page :)

Thanks, I'll definitely make these changes. Appreciate it!

I usually assume landing pages are made for corporate sales, and skip them, going straight to the docs or other pages. I agree with your comment; there needs to be more meat here (though it seems like the public facing website is probably still in a beta phase).

Advice for the OP: I used to make professional briefings for the military. The single most important part of any slideshow or document was the WIFM page - the Why It F**ing Matters page (I kid you not, that acronym was what everyone used). It gave a no-fluff, terse summary of why the product was relevant to the audience, often including a 3 sentence overview of the briefing, and one paragraph explaining what they should take away from it. Think of it like a very terse abstract, using the plainest language possible, very much like what you wrote above. For the people who need to know what a thing is, it's a godsend that keeps them from instantly moving on.

Thanks, that's great to know. Love the Why It F*ing Matters page. Definitely going to make sure we get straight to the point.

For folks on AWS CodeBuild and CodePipeline there still isn't a good dashboard tool for everyone. Maybe consider some features for AWS teams?

Good call, to be honest we haven't had many requests for AWS Codebuild / CodePipeline. Outside of Github, most of our requests are for Azure Devops, Bitbucket and Gitlab. I'll bring it up with the team and see when/how we can implement them.

Will one be able to embed a Hetchr ATOM into Hetchr in the future?

Mind elaborating? All Hetchr ATOMs are embedded into your workspace.

I recommend adding more Product Manager tools like Monday, Smartsheets, etc. I notice that a lot of PMs have separate tools for managing roadmap stuff (even though Jira works for this too, idk).

Definitely on our to-do list!

> OP here. Here’s a quick summary about what we’re building:

Why isn't this summary on your page, front and center? Why instead there are animations, illustrations, skewed screenshots the size of atoms (yes, pun intended)?

Spotify's Backstage suffers from many of the same issues, but at least it spends time explaining what it actually does: http://backstage.io

Can you integrate AWS CodePipeline and CloudWatch?

There are no good integrations, and I would love to be able to get a quick overview. Bonus points for nice display on mobile.

Definitely. We're working on our priority list and will give these a +1.

Please add an ATOM that connects to anything which allows for a decent Gantt chart. As an architect-come-product-manager, I really need visibility of a gantt to see where we are in a delivery cycle, against what your other ATOMs provide (issue tracking, PRs, etc). No tool comes close to offering this, especially when my team is tied to Jira. There are Jira plugins but they suck, there are calendar views but they suck, there are gantt tools, but they’re external to Jira/GitHub so break context when jumping between them, or require some browser-window-fu to lay out nicely on my screen. The latter is impossible with an iPad, and not great if I want to present either in a meeting or permanently on a wall mounted TV.

Also something that could maybe display some charts based off a JSON URL, that could be sweet for viewing data, and allow us devs to specify the data we want.

I’ve signed up for a beta so would love to give it a go.

Looks cool so far! An ATOM for Clubhouse[1] would be great, and I think their API should support it.

[1]: https://clubhouse.io/

The fine Hetchr folks recently gave me a demo of the product, listened to my feedback, and more, which is greatly appreciated. It was refreshing to see the patience they had with me as I talked through my use cases, frustrations, and my thoughts on areas for improvement.

Secondly, I've been working on bringing Hetchr into my worflow, specifically with Github Pull Requests and JIRA Kanban board. Having everything in place where I can take a quick glance to see how things are going is very easy.

I'll keep on eye on how Hetchr executes on their roadmap, on feedback, and responding to bugs. Best of luck, Hetchr team!

Thanks Ishwar, I appreciate you being one of our first testers and giving us super in-depth feedback. Keep us updated on what you want to see next!

This is kind of a wow moment, when I see a real product made by someone else that is a kind of realization of my idea I have drown down on paper many (11+) years ago, while I was bored in school. Developer portal composed of widgets - just as in good old Netvibes - sounds awesome. Congratulations and good luck!

Plot twist: We found your notebook and ran with it.

In all seriousness, it's really cool to hear it's something you thought of years ago. One day, we'd like to allow anyone to build their own widgets inside of Hetchr, and I hope to see one of yours.

Your landing page is extremely resource-intensive and scrolling is super choppy & annoying. Not a good first impression.

Thank you for your feedback, we're working on it in order to bring something more appealing

Hey FYI guys - your privacy policy at https://www.hetchr.com/privacypolicy creates a redirect loop with cache misses going to eu-central-1 EKS Varnish

Thank your for your help, I fixed it

sadly the site is unreadable in brave browser on Android (latest stable)

Brave 1.26.71 on Android 10 here, looks fine to me other than having to pinch to zoom on the pictures

Yep, completely unusable on mobile.

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