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Comment by nicorojas9 | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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...

Hey! This is great insight, honestly wasn’t aware and you’re right. Any chance of sending a PR for this? Would you be interested on talking about employment with us (open to part time)? We are a fully remote company.

Cool, it's great you'll look into it! Although I like working with dev tools, unfortunately I can't take on additional projects at the moment.

Please let us know if anything changes on your side!

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