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Show HN: DrawDB – open-source online database diagram editor (a retro)

(www.drawdb.app)
263 points 1ilit | 1 comments | 09 Apr 25 00:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.199s | 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?

1. hliyan ◴[09 Apr 25 07:42 UTC] No.43629780[source]▶
A suggestion based on an idea that I've been trying to implement for a while: consider replacing the left panel's form editing experience with an assistive command line at the bottom.

E.g. rather than clicking table, "add field", clicking the name, typing, clicking the type drop down etc., just start writing something like:

    : users.add_column
    name: email
    type: varchar
    length: 200
etc., with some assistive auto complete

or, if you're inclined to using an LLM:

   add column email to users table, varchar(200)
or, for those who want strict sql:

   alter table add column...