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263 points 1ilit | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.24s | source

One year ago I open-sourced my very first 'real' project and shared it here. I was a college student in my senior year and desperately looking for a job. At the time of sharing it i couldn't even afford a domain and naively let someone buy the one i had my eyes on lol. It's been a hell of a year with this blowing up, me moving to another country, and switching 2 jobs.

In a year we somehow managed to hit 26k stars, grow a 1000+ person discord community, and support 37 languages. I couldn't be more grateful for the community that helped this grow, but now i don't know what direction to take this project in.

All of this was an accident. But now I feel like I'm missing out on not using this success. I have been thinking of monetization options, but not sure if I wanna go down that route. I like the idea of it being free and available for everyone but also can't help but think of everything that could be done if committed full-time or even had a small team. I keep telling myself(and others) i'll do something if i meet a co-founder, but doubt and fear of blowing this up keeps back.

How would you proceed?

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mubou ◴[] No.43629313[source]
It can even export as Mermaid? That's awesome. I could see that being super useful as a way to take a db schema and turn it into a chart for a github readme. Definitely bookmarking this.

Btw, the SQL import doesn't seem to work for an sqlite `.schema` dump; it breaks on the PRIMARY KEY here:

    CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS "__EFMigrationsHistory" (
        "MigrationId" TEXT NOT NULL CONSTRAINT "PK___EFMigrationsHistory" PRIMARY KEY,
        "ProductVersion" TEXT NOT NULL
    );
(This is the standard migrations table that Entity Framework creates.)

W/r/t monetization, you should know there's a really powerful flowchart tool called draw.io that's already free. It's not tailored specifically towards databases the way yours is, but it can make similar graphs, so if you go too hard on monetizing you might cause people to just use that instead. Maybe there are some more B2B-oriented extensions or db integrations, or maybe a team collaboration feature you could add without compromising the core tool.

replies(1): >>43629470 #
1. 1ilit ◴[] No.43629470[source]
thank you!

regarding the sql import, it breaks because of the parser. i'm using a 3rd party parser to parse sql and pull out everything needed for the diagram. i'll report it to them, thanks for letting me know