ArturT
Joined 13 years ago
Joined 13 years ago
Anyone using Heroku Marketplace as well? Any ideas how did you approach promoting your add-on? Thanks.
With the knapsack_pro version I focused on common needs of users and there was simple validation method to verify if particular feature was needed. People just pay if it brings value.
In case of free open source tool, people tend to want something but you don't know if they actually will you use it and sometimes people demand a thing while you have to put the hard work.
When you do paid version of your tool then somehow people are polite. :)
Nowadays I have also support for running parallel tests in JS.
More at https://knapsackpro.com and here is detailed technical explanation how it works https://docs.knapsackpro.com/2020/how-to-speed-up-ruby-and-j...
When I started my own product for Ruby & JS developers https://knapsackpro.com I was doing mostly unit testing and later relayed on E2E tests for testing user dashboard to ensure happy paths are covered.
It's very easy to introduce weird bugs and it's much faster to run CI build to test your app than manually verify if it works correctly in your browser when you make some changes.
It works similarly like tools for exceptions tracking, i.e https://www.honeybadger.io is paid but has MIT client https://github.com/honeybadger-io/honeybadger-ruby
Other than that I do support paying customers.
With time I wrote more blog posts https://docs.knapsackpro.com and shared on Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn profile or Ruby groups. From time to time posts landed in RubyWeekly newsletter.
Also asking users for recommendation might help.
I connected with each person on LinkedIn I talked to or who signed up and I followed them on Twitter. People who like your product can easily see you publish new content and can like or share it.
This problem triggered me to work on knapsack ruby gem to solve problem how to split tests across parallel CI servers and run my whole test suite faster. E2E tests can vary in time execution so I decided to split them in a dynamic way between CI nodes to auto balance tests speed between nodes.
Recently someone let me know about fix for puffing-billy gem to work with my knapsack_pro Queue Mode. https://github.com/KnapsackPro/knapsack_pro-ruby#how-to-conf...
I noticed discourse had a lot of flaky tests while using their repo to test my knapsack_pro ruby gem to run test suite with CI parallelisation. A few articles with CI examples of parallelisation can be found here https://docs.knapsackpro.com
I need to try the latest version of discourse code, maybe now it will be more stable to run tests in parallel.
Later on developed more advanced way with dynamic tests allocation across parallel CI nodes not only for Ruby to get CI build as fast as possible. To give you some idea how it works check https://docs.knapsackpro.com/2017/auto-balancing-7-hours-tes...
or watch video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUEB1XDKEFY
Here is example for Travis CI https://docs.knapsackpro.com/2018/how-to-run-travis-ci-paral...
And this is the graph showing the difference if you compare knapsack_pro dynamic tests split with what CircleCI does which is basically only time-based split. https://docs.knapsackpro.com/2018/improve-circleci-paralleli...
I spin off https://knapsackpro.com from the knapsack gem and we are helping our customers run fast CI builds.