I’m currently working on a developer-focused platform and I’m at the stage where I want to validate the direction with other developers before going further. The general idea is simple: Give developers a clear picture of how their projects evolve over time and turn that information into something useful, understandable, and engaging. The platform looks at information about your repositories and projects and transforms it into different types of insights, statistics, progress indicators, and visualizations. I’m particularly interested in understanding what developers actually value. 📊 Project insights Imagine being able to look at a project and quickly understand things such as: - How large it has become - What technologies/languages it contains - How its structure changes over time - How different projects compare with each other - How your overall development activity evolves The important part for me is not simply displaying numbers, but making those numbers meaningful. 📈 History & progress One thing I'm exploring is making project statistics useful over longer periods. For example, instead of only seeing the current state of a project, you could look back and understand how it has evolved throughout its lifetime. I'm interested in knowing: Would historical project data be something you would actually revisit? 🏆 Progression & achievements I'm also experimenting with a progression system around development activity. It could recognize different milestones and give developers something to work toward. But I'm unsure how developers actually feel about this. Would you find things like: - achievements - milestones - XP - levels - credits - personal statistics interesting and motivating? Or would you consider them unnecessary? 🧩 Understanding projects Another area I'm exploring is making the structure of a project easier to understand at a glance. Not simply showing a list of files, but presenting the information in a way that helps answer questions like: «“What does this project look like?”» «“How has it changed?”» «“How complex has it become?”» «“How does this project compare with my other projects?”» I'm particularly interested in hearing what information you would want to see. 🔐 Privacy Privacy is also an important part of the design. The platform is being designed around analyzing project metadata and statistics rather than requiring the platform to keep your actual source code. I'd like to know whether this distinction matters to developers when choosing a tool like this. --- A few questions for developers: Would you use a platform like this? Which type of information would be most valuable to you? Would you regularly check historical statistics about your projects? Do achievements/XP/levels add value, or would you prefer a completely neutral analytics experience? What would make you return to the platform regularly? What information about your development projects do you wish you could understand more easily today? If you could add one feature to a platform like this, what would it be? And most importantly: What would make you look at it and think, “This is actually useful to me”? I'm intentionally keeping the technical implementation and some of the more interesting mechanics out of this post for now. I'm mainly looking for real developer needs and opinions, not validation. Feel free to be critical. If you think the concept is unnecessary, I'd genuinely like to know why.   submitted by   /u/cytecs [link]   [comments]