Introducing: DebugMap

Hello again to both of my regular readers. It’s been a long time. It was a pretty long time ago I posted my previous entry where I optimistically (or perhaps stupidly) said I’d be launching my side project “soon”. Well, you’re in luck! 6 months later: “soon” has arrived.

I’m super proud to be launching my new website for developers, called DebugMap. It’s a tool to help programmers remember what they find while debugging. Unfortunately for all of us, debugging is something we do a lot of. I noticed that I was using a lot of text files to keep things I was finding while looking for some problem. Snippets of code, SQL queries and results, answers from StackOverflow, all that stuff. One day I thought of a way to collect and display all that stuff and decided that might actually be something others could use too. So here it is.

It turns out there’s a ton of little pieces to making something people might pay money for. I’ve launched a number of other sites and even had people give me money for some of them. But I wanted to do this “right”. I wanted to host it somewhere better than my personal server so I learned about Heroku. I wanted to do a more modern interface so I found a good color scheme and learned more modern HTML and Javascript. I’m an armchair design fan so I’ve tried to make it well designed. I did a credit card form with Stripe because nuts to Paypal. But all of this stuff takes time. I did my best to launch an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) without too many features but it still took a crazy long time to get going. I’ve told my friends about it and now I’m telling my vast and influential group of readers about it. Pretty soon I’ll tell more people and hopefully all those people will tell somebody else (hint) and in a few years I’ll have an overnight success on my hands.

Anyway, DebugMap is my new thing and I like it. If you’re a developer I hope you do too. Tell a friend! :)