[HN Gopher] Show HN: I've been making JavaScript sandbox alone f...
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Show HN: I've been making JavaScript sandbox alone for 6 years
Hi HN! Thanks for your attention to my post. It was a big
challenge to run most of Node.js packages in browser, fast
moreover. Virtual File system, resolve import/export. I got cold
many times, depressions, burned out, yet still alive and finished
it. Many guys helped me with an advice. Many users give a lot of
positive feedback. There are 200,000 monthly unique users. I work
full time now because of the freemium business model. To be honest
- I am happy after many years of hard work.
Author : ianberdin
Score : 343 points
Date : 2022-07-31 04:27 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (playcode.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (playcode.io)
| [deleted]
| foxbee wrote:
| I really like the videos on the landing page. Straight to the
| point.
| ianberdin wrote:
| Thanks. Made them recently.
| pyrossh wrote:
| Really love the interface. Very simple and easy to use. The
| themes are good as well.
| ianberdin wrote:
| Thank you! Really pleasant to hear that.
| saasxyz wrote:
| wow this is bult by a single man? I am an avid user of this site.
| I thought it is a VC backed product or something. Neat work.
| Thanks for building this.
|
| It used to be free without any time limitation. But now it only
| allows 30 minutes of free usage per day. Is this model actually
| working?
| ianberdin wrote:
| Thanks for your feedback. Unfortunately this model does not
| work.
| [deleted]
| dannersy wrote:
| Does anyone have experience with the courses?
|
| I'm trying to recommend material for learning to a friend and
| this looks like a great way to learn and see if there is interest
| without bogging someone down with environment configuration.
|
| I'd love to hear people's experiences.
| lagrange77 wrote:
| Impressive work!
|
| > I work full time now because of the freemium business model.
|
| Not sure, if i understand correctly. You're working fulltime on
| this project, because the freemium model earns enough to make you
| a living?
| ianberdin wrote:
| Exactly, I wish it is completely free, Ad free for years.
| However, full-time job takes energy and time from me and
| playcode also. So I had to figure out a way to make money to
| invest my time in PlayCode and its users.
| listenallyall wrote:
| > So I had to figure out a way to make money to invest my
| time in PlayCode and its users.
|
| This is quite an impressive project, to which you've
| dedicated 6 years of hard work. If you really have users at
| Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc., I would just ask them for
| money. These companies have tons of it and they certainly
| aren't giving their primary products away for free (don't be
| distracted by side projects like VSCode or GMail). Inform
| them that you'll be charging $39/month starting September 1.
|
| > I wish it is completely free, Ad free
|
| I get it, you have benefited from the open-source community
| and probably use a lot of free tools yourself, and you want
| to contribute or "give back." But your time, effort,
| intelligence and persistence are all valuable, don't dismiss
| that and don't assume you owe anybody stuff for free,
| especially trillion-dollar corporations.
| roetlich wrote:
| This is actually incredible! The live view updates so fast. There
| more I look at this the more amazed I am. There's even a feature
| to publish the page with a custom domain? And there's versioning
| included. Great job!
| ianberdin wrote:
| Yup, you can publish a blog, a personal page, an app, a Single
| page application with custom domain and HTTPS :) it will be
| production ready with CDN.
|
| Thank you for your feedback!
| cebert wrote:
| I'm amazed that you were single-handedly able to build such a
| complex utility working solo in your free-time. I'm impressed
| with all the features you've added and that the pro version only
| costs $4.99/mo. I hope you took notes about the progression of
| the project, as it would be an interesting story to tell one day
| on a blog or as a presentation.
| ianberdin wrote:
| Thank you for your kind. It is hard to forget problems, so I
| remember anyway :) As I said above: where to start a blog? What
| kind of subjects interesting for HN?
| cebert wrote:
| I wonder how you were able to manage your time and break down
| and implement such a significant project.
| ianberdin wrote:
| One word: sacrifice.
|
| Friends, sport, tv, family sometimes, good mood, work,
| money, everything except product.
|
| I am focused on 9 hours sleep and work.
|
| Unfortunately that is truth.
| adave wrote:
| Great achievement just for delivering something after 6 years!!!
| ianberdin wrote:
| Is it? Thanks. My friend's product has 10M views/month and 100K
| MRR. :) Photopea
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Ideas from a non-programmer: Perhaps you can cross-seed
| somehow, would it be possibly to use your sandbox to
| procedurally generate imagery in Photopea, for example? Can
| you pair Photopea up with something like processing.org's
| p5.js (I think that's what they call it) so people can do
| image processing use JS and outputting into Photopea?
|
| Also, fwiw, I've read--and consider it useful to reflect on--
| the idea that one should avoid comparison with others and
| seek first to compare yourself with yourself: have you
| improved, are you nearer your goals, have you increase your
| fulfilment ...
| ianberdin wrote:
| You are absolutely right, thanks. It is better to compare
| to myself in the past.
|
| I just forwarded your suggestion to him.
| murdho wrote:
| This is very impressive! I also admire that you stayed working on
| it for 6 years!
|
| Here's a quote I stumbled upon just earlier today: "Genius is
| eternal patience". I think it applies here too.
|
| Would be great to read a blog post about your journey with ups
| and downs. Do you plan to write something like that at some
| point?
| ianberdin wrote:
| Thank you, honestly I do not even know where to start, a lot of
| ups and downs. Yet, I am just in a middle of a way. If not a
| begining. I will try to write something, I promise.
| ndom91 wrote:
| Great project! Love the focus on speed as well compared to other
| web IDE competitors out there.
|
| However, that carefree plan 8 lines of code thing seems
| ridiculous, no? Most of the templates are already longer than 8
| lines.. I think if you just removed many of the other "nice-to-
| have" features like publishing, npm packages, etc. but made it
| unlimited lines of code / time per day, the free plan would be
| much more compelling!
|
| Also i agree with the other commentors that the logos on the
| homepage are a bit off-putting. I'd prefix it with "Used by
| engineers at...", as others have suggested as well.
|
| All in all great job though!
| ianberdin wrote:
| Thanks for the honest feedback. That is valuable.
|
| I agree, this limitation 8 lines and 20 minutes if over, sounds
| strange.
|
| One user from Google suggested me to make just 30 min daily or
| feature limited. Both of them makes 3 times smaller conversion.
|
| Still the same choice: let it be maximum Freemium or focus on
| paid users who really value the product because I need to work
| full-time on playcode? A thin line. I do not know. Maybe it is
| better to take seed round.
|
| If anyone has better answer, I wish you tell me.
| robocat wrote:
| The best talk ever on self-funding (bootstrapping):
| https://youtu.be/otbnC2zE2rw - some of what he says should be
| immediately relevant to you.
|
| > Maybe it is better to take seed round
|
| I would be very cautious about that: 1. search likely to be
| distracting , 2. do you want to be your own boss, or not? 3.
| generally investors want you to become a gigadollar business
| which I would guess is not your goal.
|
| Elsewhere you wrote: "I am pretty bad at B2B sales"
|
| Perhaps join up with someone who complements your skills that
| you like working with? Not easy, but I think easier and more
| flexible than taking money.
| sgammon wrote:
| I love this. Could it be embedded for use in other software?
| Curious as we might have a use case if so.
| mehal wrote:
| I was thinking the same! What's your use-case for embedding?
| ianberdin wrote:
| Thank you for the feedback. Can you please tell me about the
| case? Here or at ruslan@ playcode.io
| sgammon wrote:
| I'll drop you a line :)
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Great job!
|
| I can sort of relate. I worked on an infrastructure system,
| almost entirely alone, for ten years, before it was finally taken
| over by a capable team, and I was able to step away, and it took
| on a life of its own. It is now a worldwide standard, used daily,
| by thousands.
|
| I say "sort of," because it was never something I planned to make
| money on. It filled a need. Also, and it's a long story, I had to
| weather a fairly hefty level of abuse during that time. The
| demographics of the target user base were ... _challenging_.
|
| It's all good, now.
|
| One thing all that time brought me, was a _really_ high-Quality
| product. Lots of time to squash bugs, and iterate the UX.
| ianberdin wrote:
| Insane. I wish you tell more, please! About the abuse: wooah,
| playcode had and has many abusers, carders , phishing pages.
| Playcode was banned for many times by hosting providers. A lot
| of reports from google, Microsoft, etc.
|
| It is so incredible meet a man who run product also. Can we
| connect? Telegram @ ruslan_ianberdin
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I don't do Telegram (nothing against it, but I don't really
| need it). You have options to get in touch w/me from my HN
| ID. Happy to chat!
| selestify wrote:
| Wow, would you be willing to say which infrastructure system
| you had worked on?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Not in public (not going out of my way to take public credit
| for it is part of the deal).
|
| However, it's not confidential, and I have no problem sharing
| it on a one-to-one (also, it isn't too hard to guess).
| larodi wrote:
| Software development is a lone business...
| ianberdin wrote:
| Yeah, it is. My friend is a computer and psychologist.
| pkrotich wrote:
| I wish you had a blog detailing your journey! Perhaps I missed it
| - but would love to learn more about what got you into the
| project and how you kept going!
| inflam52 wrote:
| Nice work! I wish I would have come across this sooner or I might
| not have started building https://webden.dev for the past year
| haha. PLAYCODE is definitely more robust as far as features
| (courses, virtual file system, pro version, users, node.js,
| transpiled projects, etc) but it's cool to see your big focus on
| speed. The rest of the ecosystem felt so heavy and bloated when I
| originally started looking.
|
| Also, thanks for sharing your story! Very inspiring!
| synergy20 wrote:
| how is this different from other online editors,e.g.codepen etc
| ianberdin wrote:
| Thanks for the question. First of all it isn't a Pen :)
|
| Codepen is a community first while having a pretty limited and
| slow editor without NPM modules, multiple files, rich console,
| etc.
| synergy20 wrote:
| so the key here is that you put node.js inside a browser,
| that anyone can use your platform directly to work in a
| nodejs system for frontend without local npm installation and
| node_modules/ hassles?
| ianberdin wrote:
| Absolutely. Zero setup coding environment with result view
| as you type.
| synergy20 wrote:
| Thanks, that's very impressive!
| deanc wrote:
| If I can offer one minor criticism when i see every major tech
| company listed as your users, I instantly get a sense of a
| distrust as people do this to inflate the legitimacy and
| popularity of their service. Why should we trust the statement
| that all these companies are using your product? I think it's
| disingenuous to suggest that a lone employee uses it or even a
| collection without an actual commitment from those companies.
| Imagine if every company that ever had traffic from a Google IP
| put this on their homepage. I could add it to my blog.
| autoconfig wrote:
| As a counterpoint, I don't think it's disingenuous and I have
| zero problems with it. I would only find it disingenuous if the
| statement made was false (trusted by developers at). Comparing
| traffic alone with actual usage of a product is weird.
| Obviously two very different things.
| ianberdin wrote:
| Yep, I understand your feelings. I have Developers from these
| companies. Not a company itself, I am pretty bad at B2B sales.
| randomdigitz wrote:
| Who's to say that person is right? If anything test it. That
| person may have a personal and incorrect feeling about the
| logos. They may be worse at b2b sales than you.
| lupire wrote:
| enduroman wrote:
| Make sure you are authorized to use their logos. I know Intel
| would request removal from sites like this when I worked
| there.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| lots of companies put a logo up without permission and just
| wait for a takedown request, there usually aren't
| consequences as long as you comply
| davidro80 wrote:
| scrollaway wrote:
| Those company-legitimacy boxes are useful for b2b sales when
| you're trying to sell a product that the companies in
| question actually pay for. This doesn't seem to be what
| you're trying to do so IMO I agree with the GP and you're
| better off removing it.
|
| Look at the ReactJS homepage (https://reactjs.org/), it's the
| same as yours minus b2b fluff, and heaven knows they could
| list some companies in there :)
| TheTaytay wrote:
| For what it's worth, as an individual dev, if I can trust the
| logos, I think it does add social proof. "Trusted by
| developers at..." can be a way to contextualize it.
| neilv wrote:
| My favorite use of brand name-dropping is the kind when a
| competitor of a seed-stage startup generated a news piece on
| their new partnership with Microsoft...
|
| I was instantly concerned, at a sign of a huge player with
| major platform control entering our space.
|
| Then I looked into it a bit, and it appeared all the competitor
| company had gotten is normal free startup cloud credits for
| Azure.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I can't tell from the landing page, what are the limitations of
| the free version / what do you get for subscribing? I always want
| to know this before I invest my time in anything.
| tyingq wrote:
| There wasn't a link to this page I could find, but Google found
| this: https://playcode.io/pricing
|
| If that's current, the free plan is limited to 8 lines of code.
| That kind of pushes the definition of "freemium".
| joshuajomiller wrote:
| How do you stay motivated to continue working on this alone for
| such a long time?
| TAForObvReasons wrote:
| You charge money and it becomes your livelihood. No obvious
| pricing page, but uBlock Origin detects Stripe scripts
| ianberdin wrote:
| Right, it is not fully free. And it makes sense, right?
| joshxyz wrote:
| courses here have pro tier
|
| https://playcode.io/learn/basic-javascript
|
| to OP: the contact links on the page are not working, i wonder
| how much team pricing is ty
| ianberdin wrote:
| Thanks for the question. It is the biggest problem ever. I
| wanted to stop a million times. A super hard problem to solve
| and super taugh to get motivation to move forward.
|
| There are few quotes which helps me in bad days: "I choose
| whether I will succeed or not.>>
| endorphine wrote:
| Care to share other similar quotes? I've been working on a
| passion project for a few months and I definitely have my
| downs in terms of motivation.
| ctxc wrote:
| Hey, what are you working on? :D
| htp wrote:
| I'm a fan of this one: Never give up on a
| dream just because of the time it will take to accomplish
| it. The time will pass anyway. Earl
| Nightingale
| ianberdin wrote:
| Wow, love it! Thanks.
| ianberdin wrote:
| - "Defeat is a temporary thing."
|
| - "Nothing could stop him."
|
| - "One of the most common reasons for failure is the
| tendency to quit the game, faced with temporary defeats,
| and immediately give up."
|
| - "Despite any difficulties, we must continue the work we
| have started"
|
| All about the same :)
| asicsp wrote:
| I use this quote as inspiration (don't remember where I
| adapted it from):
|
| > _Doing is often better than thinking of doing_
| fbarred wrote:
| Resubmit with "Show HN" in the title? Then it will be visible in
| https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew and
| https://news.ycombinator.co.m/show
| ianberdin wrote:
| Thanks, I just tried, yet HN do not allow to submit multiple
| times.
| Gys wrote:
| Send an email to the contact at the bottom of each page. They
| are very helpful.
| ianberdin wrote:
| Sent, still no response. Maybe he is at weekend.
| ianberdin wrote:
| Thanks @dang. You are awesome.
| dang wrote:
| We've added it now.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| @dang ? Sometimes the mod will show up when tagged, although
| officially there isn't any user tagging here.
| heddycrow wrote:
| OP, I've been working on a very similar thing for some years now,
| too. I could write a book about this at this point, but I will
| avoid gushing here.
|
| Please let me share some pain.
|
| Many developers/companies make this thing and none of them really
| know how to (or can) share. I'm happy to share my list.
|
| The end result, as I see it, is a fragmented mess of either
| partially completed or fully completed and walled (and/or poorly
| modularized) software.
|
| Take for example VS Code's tree view. Can a developer with a need
| for an explorer view just use VS Code's tree module? Not hardly.
| Go reinvent.
|
| Contrast that with CodeMirror. If you look, you will see
| CodeMirror everywhere. This software truly empowers devs and it
| has resulted in pure awesomeness.
|
| There's no shame in not open sourcing what you've created, I'm
| assuming you haven't. And I can't say anything about how you have
| modularized your components.
|
| But it pains me that the next dev who gets an idea like yours
| will either give up or spend 6 years struggling to create the
| same thing (except the CodeMirror part).
|
| Worse, Microsoft can afford to struggle and or throw people/money
| at this. They can pay people to work full time. They can give
| away their editor(and more) for free. That's a win from user's
| POV.
|
| Are you aware that VS Code runs on GitHub and does the majority
| of this kind of thing? I think they could completely shut down
| all sandboxes or similar kinds of software from a financial
| perspective.
|
| I said I wouldn't write a book.
|
| Anyways, I strongly appreciate what you have done. It looks
| great.
|
| I wish we lived in a world where we could work on the same team
| building this kind of thing.
|
| My best wishes to you on getting paid to do it full time.
| ianberdin wrote:
| For sure. There are a lot of things to do:
|
| - files tree,
|
| - windows manager (it looks simple to implement, yet 2000 lines
| of code),
|
| - tabs,
|
| - better syntax highlighter,
|
| - code bundler (3-4 years to research),
|
| - transpilers,
|
| - preview (service worker serve it with bidirectional request
| between bundler worker and service worker and another window
| preview also),
|
| - console (it is pretty hard to describe every data type and
| make client-server between iframe and console to show nested
| structures dynamically)
|
| And more...
|
| Yeah, I do not think I can share source code. Thanks for your
| message.
| heddycrow wrote:
| It certainly is a lot of work.
|
| Humble suggestion: please call out the open source software
| you have used in some sort of credits section.
|
| Forgive me if this exists and I am missing it.
| virgil_disgr4ce wrote:
| Any chance you've open-sourced any of this? I've been looking for
| a way to run Node.js packages in-browser!
| apineda wrote:
| Hey I just recently used this to play with a package (`deep-
| diff`). Thanks for making this!
| ianberdin wrote:
| So I strongly suggest
| https://www.npmjs.com/package/@n1ru4l/json-patch-plus/v/0.1....
| then. If you need diff and patch.
| jawns wrote:
| @ianberdin, there's a link to "Sign up." But it doesn't give a
| good indication of what signing up does. Does it give me access
| to additional features? Does it sign me up for marketing emails?
| Normally at the sign-up stage, users are presented with a Terms
| of Service link or something else that gives further details, but
| it looks like you only present this information after the user
| has entered their info. Would you consider adding something like
| this up-front so I know what I'm actually signing up for BEFORE I
| enter my info?
| LionTamer wrote:
| https://playcode.io/pricing might help?
| bogwog wrote:
| The free tier on that page says you get "8 lines of code". Is
| that a typo? Does the app really not let you write more than
| 8 lines of code? Of what use is that to anyone?
| plugin-baby wrote:
| You can do a lot with 8 lines.
| mrtksn wrote:
| One reason for the love part of my love-hate relationship with JS
| is its low barrier to get from 0 to productive thanks to tools
| like this(and the console in the browser dev tools).
|
| JS actually has a lot of buffer until you hit the bloat.
| ianberdin wrote:
| Absolutely. I was Golang/Python dev before. Node.js is so nice
| and simple compared. Love it.
| tentacleuno wrote:
| If I were to offer some feedback, the English on the homepage
| needs some tightening up. There's some bad grammar in there. That
| would definitely make it look a bit more professional :-)
| ianberdin wrote:
| It would be awesome if you can help. Do you use telegram? @
| ruslan_ianberdin
| Zanni wrote:
| Not OP, but here's a couple of quick fixes for you (honestly,
| your English is pretty good): "Play with any of 2 millions of
| NPM packages ..." -> "Play with any of 2 million NPM packages
| ..." "PlayCode is fastest coding experience ever." ->
| "PlayCode is the fastest coding experience ever." "It helps
| to avoid looking for a documentation ..." -> "It helps avoid
| looking for documentation ..."
| ianberdin wrote:
| Thank you for your time.
| soxocx wrote:
| Also note, the section "Bug Finder" on the landingpage
| just contains the text of the "Emmet" section above it.
|
| Cool project besides that :)
| ianberdin wrote:
| Interesting :) thanks.
| shmde wrote:
| I actually used this as an online editor for my Javascript
| interview. I love the interface and the pure dark mode throughout
| the UI.
| ianberdin wrote:
| Wow really? Thank you. I had a pretty "dark" year when: I was
| unable to finish 3rd release with real-time collaboration,
| nested project folders, flexible permissions, workspaces,
| offline cache and many more as Notion has. And it was too much
| for myself. Just unable to merge it to production because of
| many changes. So that is sad. I wish to move some of this
| features to production. It will be nice to use in coding
| bootcamps, schools, finding interview, etc.
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