Yeah, the runtime component is an ExcelDNA addin. The IDE component is a VSTO addin. Since VSTO doesn't allow defining custom functions I switched to using ExcelDNA for the runtime.
No plans for the cloud solution so far. I figured it needs a community, so a lot of it has to be free for non commercial use. For commercial use I figured the price isn't going to be an issue. Probably there's more tweaking to do there. I'd love to get some thoughts on it.
Let me know if I can help with trying it out. I'm in the "do-things-that=don't-scale" mode, at least until I save up for my mansion, so please feel free to make use of it!
I like the way you list things you like. Never heard of IndieHackers, but I'd love to be interview by them if they'll have me. I'll check em out. Cheers for the tip and the kind words.
Absolutely!:) I didn't expect this at all. I had to write 5 articles as part of my last milestone for HugeThing (accelerator) and share them somewhere. I wrote four technical ones in a day and a half. I then struggled with this one for three days. Had no idea where I'd share it or if I was going to use it at all. Finished it up this morning, and figured what the heck, I'll post it on HN. Probably no one's going to read it. Holy moly, was I wrong. Immediately posted on Reddit too, where it went through the roof.
Yeah, it pretty easy to see it in my history, congrats. I posted about the project multiple times while I was working on it over the last four years. I also mention posting on HackerNews in the article.
Fantastic! If you're up for it, I'd love to demo and discuss over screen share. If you'd be interested let me know via email, it's antonio at querystorm dot com.
Hey! Absolutely you can! You can embed code into the workbook and automate stuff. If you're up for it, I'd love to discuss over Skype. It's the perfect use case! Send me an email, it's antonio at querystorm dot com.
Hey! I scan the entire contents of the table. I have a cache layer in memory anyway so that works quickly. If you have multiple types in the same column, it just treats the type as "object". If you connect, and start entering various types into your columns, you'll notice in the object explorer that it updates the type information.
Hey, I think I should respond, as I agree with you that loved ones should not be tossed aside easily. Passion projects are pretty important too and should be fostered. It's important to please one's own being too. Anyway, it was indeed an exaggeration for comic effect. Anna (not her real name) is a lovely person. We did break up, but much later on and completely unrelated to the project. She was actually very quite happy with what I had built and had once made an angry remark about how much time I was spending on it. The majority of the article is true, but I did make up one or two twists just for the comic effect. I'm also not really interested in a mansion. So far.
Yeah, it's quite difficult to sell and quite easy to start wondering if what you're doing is valuable to anyone. If the need and the willingness to pay are already there, that's a perfect opportunity. Good on them!
This. Absolutely agree with both points. Going it alone is hard, and developers have issues with self promotion. Sales seems like dirty word to us. The thing is, when I'm the customer, I don't mind being sold to. As long as it's not a flat out lie, I actually find I appreciate the stuff I buy more if the sales person made me feel good about it.
I've never used Firebird db so far. I have no idea how it differs. I will check it out, and possibly include it. QueryStorm already supports 6-7 different types of databases so one more won't be too difficult to add. Thanks for the tip!
Thanks and I hope you use of it, that would be fantastic! Let me know if you need any help, there's a contact email on the website. There's a sales and support address, but feel free to pick any one, they all go to me:)
Primarily, it's a lot more convenient. There's no setup involved, you just click and and the data is available through SQL or C#. There's no need to clean the data around the tables, it works on live data (file does not need to be saved), no connection strings to set up or boilerplate code to write.
There's more, e.g. the SQLite engine can interact with Excel and fiddle with formatting, but I think the major thing is convenience. As a dev, most times I just wouldn't bother with the ODBC approach unless I really had to. Convenient C# and SQL though, I'd use them at least 10x more often.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment! This is my first try at entrepreneurship. I'd be lying if I said that I'm always sure it was worth it. Most of the time, though, I really think it is, regardless of if it's commercially a success or not. Probably sounds corny, but for a product to work commercially, it needs to have both passion from your end and usefulness on the other. I think if there's no passion, it's probably not going anywhere and even if it does it's not worth it.
Yeah, it was really fun to built! The parser, editor features and C# support were amazing to work on. Some times I felt like I was wasting time, but when I compare what I was working on most days in a corp to what I get to work on with QueryStorm, I'm pretty happy I did what I did. As for open source, that might be a better way to go. The project needs a community and open sourcing would help a lot. It's something for me to consider.