Canadian software engineer living in Europe.
Monolith has the same problem here. I think the best resolution might be some sort of browser-plugin based solution where you could say “archive this” and have it push the result somewhere.
I wonder if I could combine a dumb plugin with Monolith to do that… A weekend project perhaps.
Monolith can be particularly handy for this. I used it in a recent project to archive the outgoing links from my own site. Coincidentally, if anyone is interested in that, it’s called django-cool-urls.
You probably want to look into Health Checks. I believe you can tell Docker to “start service B when service A is healthy”, so you can define your health check with a script that depends on Tailscale functioning.
So my first impression is that the requirement to copy-paste that elaborate SQL to get the schema is clever but not sufficiently intuitive. Rather than saying “Run this query and paste the output”, you say “Run this script in your database” and print out a bunch of text that is not a query at all but a one-liner Bash script that relies on the existence of pbcopy – something that (a) doesn’t exist on many default installs (b) is a red flag for something that’s meant to be self-hosted (why am I talking to a pasteboard?), and (c) is totally unnecessary anyway.
Instead, you could just say: “Run this query and paste the result in this box” and print out the raw SQL only. Leave it up to the user to figure out how they want to run it.
Alternatively you can also do something like: “Run this on your machine and copy/paste the output”:
$ curl 'https://app.chartdb.io/superquery.sql' | psql --user USERNAME --host HOSTNAME DBNAME
In the case of the cloud service, it’s also not clear if the data is being stored on the server or client side in LocalStorage. I would think that the latter would be preferable.
This is a common problem with Free software, and honestly I think it’s our biggest one: we build stuff for ourselves and stop there. If we want our stuff to be adopted (which, for things that rely on network effects, we do) then we need to pay more attention to usability.
Here’s a suggestion for anyone starting a project they think they might share. Before you start writing any code, write the documentation. Then rewrite it from the perspective of the least tech-literate person you know who you’d still want to use the project. Only after you’ve worked out how easy it should be for this person to get started, then you can start writing the thing.
I just went through F-Droid and counted out all the projects I have on my phone. At £5 each I’m looking at an annual bill of about £70/year… Bargain.
Thanks for the idea!