Road to Open Source
Discover more from Kloudi’s Newsletter
Road to Open Source
Story of our HN launch, the learnings and Open Sourcing Kloudi.
Hey! good folks of the internet and all the lovely folks who have been following us through our journey. The past week has gone by so fast with so much happening. Here is taking a moment from what has been a week of happiness, critique and overall mixed emotions. In last week’s post, we released our locally hosted desktop app into the wild. We asked folks on Hacker News to share their quick feedback so that we could iterate and build for our users. While we didn’t expect it to be a bed of roses but some really decided to take it all the way with the plain critiquing without leaving us a feedback that could be worked on. Minus the very few who just came in for the bashing most of you have shared some really good points, rightfully questioned us and shared some great feedback. We decided to dedicate this newsletter to the feedback we have received, how we plan to improve and clear some presumptions that our release might have led to.
To start with Kloudi is the result of the relentless grind of just 2 people for whom this is a second stint at being entrepreneurs. Previously Nitish and I ran a bootstrapped startup for 3 years. Needless to say we don’t have cushy corporate jobs backing our endeavour and fervour for building Kloudi. We are a 2 people army and our north star was and will always be to deliver you the best, with that let me delve into points raised during the feedback.
Locally hosted, not yet open-sourced
Many folks presumed that since we were locally hosted we were open sourced and granted that us talking about data privacy enabling might have pushed that notion. While we aren’t Open Sourced yet we do plan to take that route and you will be able to see us as a part of the community by March 5th 2021. As we speak licensing and open-sourcing the code is in progress. Right now we are available as a macOS app that can be installed and used with docker.
Acknowledging getting bashed for our Bash script
Our install routine currently involved ‘curl | sh’ granted we are guilty of taking a shorter route to launch, but with the current build the idea was to get feedback on the utility and we made it as secure as possible. We would definitely like to give a shout out to Henrique Vincente for sharing this very insightful blog and steering us in the direction of doing this right. Linking it here for other folks to refer as well https://henvic.dev/posts/cs-security/ . The code signing suggestion is something that we will definitely take up and look into, right now we are limited on resources but the love we see for the product keeps us going and we have definitely taken a hard look and solid measure of the situation.
The FullStory Debate
One of the apps that we use is Fullstory, again to reiterate we do not view or store your tool data. The idea was to understand what features are liked by you folks and what are not and where we can improve. While we wish we could schedule a detailed call with each and everyone of you, all of us know that in the real world folks are swamped with work and would rarely give time to random startup founders. We do have a few who do take time out and share feedback but that in no way gives us the right to ignore what the rest want. All of this said we should have made it an opt-in from our end, which at the time of release we did not. After you folks rightly pointed it out and suggested we change that bit, we did take cognisance of our error and with our upcoming release made it opt-in.
Why no Docs?
Many of you wanted to see our documentation and that is something that has been in progress and isn’t yet out. Currently we are constrained by the 2 people team that we are and most of the time we find our hands full. We have heard you and are accelerating the process of sharing our documentation soon.
These are just a few things we wanted to share. We are just 2 builders who want to ease the journey of developers through our universal command line for tools. Sometimes we err, and some things we do right but in no way is any of our process or journey clandestine. We can’t reiterate enough that your data and security is and always will be our priority and is not something we want to endanger. In conclusion you will be seeing us in the Open Source pastures soon, watch out for March 5th 2021 and we will be sharing our documentation as well. For folks who find our dream interesting and want to help build Kloudi, we welcome you with open arms. Feel free to drop us a mail or pick a slot and chat with us and share your thoughts.
We are and will always be building.
Interested in trying out our Kloudi? Go to https://kloudi.tech/get-started and let us know your feedback.