Write documentation first. Then build

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

Our great sponsors
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
  • Lunar

    Intelligent adaptive brightness for your external monitors

    I guess that makes sense when you start a product specifically made to be sold. It’s good to have the end product as well defined as possible so you know how far ahead the end result is.

    But when “scratching your own itch”, docs would take away all of the ambition you started with because you might realize the scope of the project is bigger than you’d like.

    When I got my first monitor in 2017, I couldn’t believe that the only way to change its brightness throughout the day was to use a clunky joystick to go through the monitor menus and find the brightness setting, and press the joystick a million times to lower the brightness until it’s comfortable again.

    So I started to create Lunar (https://lunar.fyi) with that in mind, an app that can automatically change the brightness of my monitor throughout the day.

    It was my first time doing a Mac app, my first time reading about DDC and my first time creating a desktop UI. If I had started with docs, that app would have never existed, because I would have realized just how much I didn’t know.

    Simply building it, bit by bit, led me to a good enough end result, that I could use myself and share with others, and no documentation was needed when the app did just one thing.

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

Suggest a related project

Related posts