Buildshare

All right, we're live. GM, GA, GE everybody. Welcome to another episode of DevNTell. So we are going to be having on today Mattia. Due to unforeseen circumstances, we are under the clock as the power in Mattia's building has gone out and he is running off a hotspot off his phone which is about to die. So we want to get right into the content here. So I guess a brief introduction about yourself, Mattia, before we get into the meat of the content. And welcome by the way, love having you on.

Yeah, thank you, thank you so much for having me here. Yeah, sorry about the conditions were unexpected. Hopefully, we'll make it through without too much trouble. So yeah, an intro about me, I'm Mattia, I'm from Italy and I've been building things for a while. I am a developer, started to code years ago when I was in high school, then went to university for studying computer science and I've always been building a lot of side projects in my career. Then I really got interested into web development and I started freelancing into WebDev for a while. I was also a coding tutor in my university and eventually, I got interested into web3 and that became basically my focus. I started working in a couple of startups in the space, in DeFi and more. And then I just decided a few months ago to just go full-time into working on my own ideas because that's what I always actually wanted to do. And now here I am, just working full-time on several projects, and currently on Buildshare that I'm going to share with you today. Super excited about that.

Awesome and you're actually part of buildspace aren't you? The last couple of seasons. Have you been working on Buildshare the last few iterations or is this something new that you brought on this season?

It's actually something very new. It started three weeks ago basically with the new season of buildspace. And yeah, I've been part of basically all the seasons of buildspace since season one. And every season I've been working on a different project actually. So yeah, I happen to change often what I work on, it's just my style. But yeah, every time it's something new but yeah, hopefully this will keep going even after the season because I'm having a lot of fun and people seem to like it and it's been great so far.

Yeah, looks like a very intriguing project, I'm very curious to learn more about it. So I guess let's dive right into it. What do you got planned for us today?

Yeah, let's go. Okay, so I'm going to share my screen. Let me know if you can see that.

It looks like Mattia has frozen. Let's give him a couple of seconds to see if he comes back on. Maybe. If you're just coming in late gang, the power in Mattia's building went out so he's at the mercy of his Wi-Fi hotspot. So we just got to wait. Oh, I guess it dropped off. Yeah, I guess we will hang here for a couple minutes more. In the unfortunate event where we can't continue, we'll have to reschedule. But yeah, just hanging tight and don't know if there's going to play any lobby music in this thing. See. What is this? All right, we're back.

I'm back with you guys.

We're back, we're back.

We've been so unlucky and lucky at the same time because my phone died and it would have been impossible for me to do this but the light came back so there is still a chance, there is still hope.

It evened out, it's all good, it's all good.

Okay, I'll go back to share my screen. You see? All right, yeah, let's do it. All right, yeah, so just going to give a quick intro with slides but then just jump straight into demo because I want to show you what I'm building. So, Buildshare is basically a tool that helps builders, especially developers, to build in public. And it does it especially by helping developers to post updates on social media about what they're building to share it with others. But like a quick intro first, what does building in public even mean for those who don't know? and it's quite simple actually, it just means sharing your work with the world right, so showing what you're working on to other people. And sharing where? Actually social media mainly, because simply because it's the most effective way to reach other people nowadays. And the question is now like why it matters, why to build in public, why to share what we do with other people, like what's the point? And it's because actually sharing your work with others helps you to go in the right way. And what I mean by this is that when you're working on something, if you're just building on your own, you can only think so far. You're going to build a product how you want it to be or how you think is the proper way to be. But what happens that when you talk with other people you can get different perspectives and see things that you wouldn't have seen otherwise. So people give you feedback basically, give you suggestions on how to improve your product, they tell you what they like, what they don't like, what's missing, what maybe they want to see there, maybe new features that you maybe haven't even thought about right. And they also give you motivation, like seeing people that appreciate your work or just talk about your work, talk with you and give you suggestions, it's very motivating to keep going while building on your own as actually not that much because you're just on your own right, where people help you to craft this vision that you have. And finally opportunities, this is very broad but basically just by sharing your work on social media nowadays you have no idea what might happen and who you might meet, who might see what you shared. So opportunities means maybe you can be potential co-founders, you can meet investors or in general like you meet people in the wild just because of sharing what you do. And so how did I start building in public? I just want to give a brief intro and that's actually thanks to this company called buildspace. And for those who don't know, buildspace is basically like a school for people that want to work on their ideas. And they run a six-weeks program called Nights and Weekends where basically people work on their own ideas for six weeks along with thousands of other people. And they actually build in public, they just share updates on what they're working on on social media, they talk to each other, they give each other feedback. And basically, I've participated in this program four times because they did four different seasons. And the first season of buildspace Nights and Weekends is actually how I got started building in public. And before that I was doing things quite different actually. So I was the type of guy that just was building a lot of stuff on his own, I was waiting until was good enough to launch, then I was launching it, then I was trying to understand if someone would care, if people would use it right. And turns out that sometimes people don't care, and often times people don't care. And maybe other times people kind of like it but maybe they thought it should be a little bit different and what if I knew before what people wanted right, that's the whole point of talking with people early and building in public is basically the best way to do it. So I was even skeptical, like I remember thinking why should I even tell people my idea, maybe they steal it, maybe they do it better, I don't know. I remember having this thought actually before applying to Nights and Weekends and yeah, it's funny because now it seems stupid. But basically, I decided to just give it a try and see what happened. And it turns out that building in public helped me so much. Helped me to stay way more motivated because I actually got people that cared about what I was doing, so that was helping me to go along and instead of switching projects super often, like keep working on them because people were liking them or people were giving them feedback. And also I met a bunch of cool people by building in public, I met very interesting people that I would have never met otherwise probably just because maybe they reached out because they liked what I was doing or I reached out to them because they were also showing their work. So this is just a little overview of why building in public it's so powerful and I care so much about it. And basically, Buildshare is just a project that I started few weeks ago, for very fresh for Nights and Weekends season 4 actually and I just want to help people to build in public because it's a topic that as I said I really care about and I think there are so many people that maybe don't want to do it or maybe they think it's hard because they don't know what to write or they're shy, they don't want to post on social media, many different reasons but it's actually not that hard. And Buildshare it's just a project that wants to help those people to do it in a more effective way and I'm just going to show you how now with the demo. So yeah, okay. You see my browser now right, just to make sure.

Yep.

Okay cool. So basically Buildshare, the way, the concept here is that like you're a developer, you want to build in public, you connect to your GitHub and every time you ship new features Buildshare generates posts for you to share on social media to announce new features and updates to your users. And so let's set up a new project from scratch. Basically okay, let's say we want to build a notes application like the next Notion. So we just need to give it a name and a tagline that says like a note-taking web app to maximize your productivity and organize your thoughts. So we need to tell Buildshare a little bit about what our product is and we'll see later why this is needed. And first thing we need to install a GitHub plugin which is basically just you know like some stuff that GitHub created that allows you to... Okay so I actually already have it installed but let's uninstall it so that we can... Yeah, so we can see the whole flow. So let's do it again, install plugin. I'm going to install it on all the repositories. Nice, so basically now I have access to the GitHub repositories that this plugin has access to and I can for example go here and search for a repository that I created for my notes application, in this case it's this one. And let's create a project and boom. So what happens now is that every time I'm either making a commit or a PR on this repository that I connected, I'm going to get a post for Twitter automatically generated here. So let's see this in action actually. So here is the repository, I already had it here, cloned in my VS Code. Okay, let's start with like with a PR example. So let's say I just released a new feature. Basically now my note-taking application supports Markdown. So I add this little Markdown editor component which of course does nothing here but let's pretend this is the actual you know new changes and stuff. So we want to make a new branch and do the PR flow. So Markdown, we created this new branch. I'm going to say add Markdown support, commit and publish this branch. So now we're going to create a pull request and we just need to be a little bit descriptive with the title and description of the pull request because under the hood we're going to use GPT to get the content of the pull request, get the content about the product, so the tagline and the title that we give before on the installation. And based on these two things and prompt engineering basically we're going to generate a post for this. So let's say add Markdown support, this PR allows users to use Markdown to write their notes, that's it and we can create this pull request and merge it. And now we should just be waiting a few seconds and that's done. Okay, now we have this post generated for our pull request. We can see the title of the pull request and we can actually just go and check it out, we can see who made it and of course we can see the post itself. So this is what GPT generated, we can copy-paste this stuff or just go and tweet it directly. So this eventually is going to be even like automatized so maybe like automated sorry, so for example I can choose that like this goes directly into Twitter without even me needing to tweet it, to click the tweet button here. But for now it's just like this and I can regenerate it if I don't like it, for example let's see. All right, I think this is much better then I save it and that's done. Now I overwrite it. So yeah, this is the pull request flow. I know that like a lot of people don't use pull requests, maybe because they're solo devs so that doesn't really make sense. So there is also a flow that can be used with commits. So let's also show this one. Let's go back to main branch, let's pull our new changes. Okay, all right, so let's say now we just want a simple feature with a commit. Let's say we want to I don't know introduce dark mode. And honestly like I'm just going to do a random change here because of course I'm not going to implement dark mode now, it's actually already implemented but whatever. And let's say add dark mode. So in this case since we're using commits, to tell Buildshare that we want to generate a post for this specific commit, we need to use a keyword. We need to start the commit message with 'feat' and then write the actual message. And this is because in the end commits, most of commits are not actually like introducing new features. Maybe it's just you know bug fixing or refactoring or whatever you know so not all commits like deserve a post. So for now the way that I'm doing it is that like you just use this keyword and that's how you tell Buildshare that you want to generate a post for this commit. So let's go, let's do it, let's push it and okay this is done, should also be matter of seconds. Let's refresh the page and here we are, so we got this new post for the commit, same stuff, we can copy it, we can tweet it, we can regenerate it and decide to save it or not. So basically this is the main idea, we when we ship new features, so by PRs or by doing commits, we get posts that let us share our work directly without you know having to write them from scratch again. And I want to make this much more advanced where we can like give to Buildshare more info about the product, so maybe we give it the website or whatever and Buildshare gets a lot of information about the product to make the commit, sorry the posts even better or maybe we can customize the style of the tweet. So there is a lot more that can be done but for now basically you know this started basically two weeks ago so this is what I got for now. Actually there is one more thing we can generate a post let's say manually from a specific commit. So maybe I forgot to add feat or maybe it's a commit in the past or whatever, we just can select other commits that we have here so I don't know let's say update logo, we select this one, we generate our post and we can regenerate even here until we like it. And when we save we have it here and we can go and tweet it as I showed before. And yep, this is our dashboard, we have the projects that we have and this is pretty much it for the demo. So happy to answer some questions now.

Yeah, this looks awesome. Yeah gang, if you have any questions for Mattia, please post them in the comment section and I will ask on your behalf. I got a couple questions. So that feature you were just showing where you could scroll through all the commits, can you also do the same thing for PRs as well?

Oh, so actually well not not right now. So it's it's a bit different because PRs by default get a commit get a post generated so unless it was for PRs in the past which now I'm thinking about it it will make sense. Yeah, it it would be nice for PRs in the past like before you install Buildshare, you it still makes sense to like select those PRs and generate a post etc. So for now it's not the case but eventually yeah for sure I will add it.

Cool. Yeah yeah, for sure. I guess do you envision any other integrations beyond just posting on socials for Buildshare because I'm sure there are there are other there are other ways for people to kind of get the word out that they're building whether it's textual content or perhaps media. Do you plan to introduce other other forms of media content as support?

Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, right now it's only for Twitter, so but I also want to add more social media platforms. So for example, one thing that I'm really bad at is like I I post consistently on Twitter but I always forget to do it like on LinkedIn or on Instagram, the socials that I don't really like. And so I I want to add like the content is also a little bit different like the way you need to structure it for Twitter or for LinkedIn or whatever so I plan to add more platforms. And also yeah, also I would like to expand beyond social media. For example, some people were suggesting to do it for like newsletters or where you can like produce maybe a weekly post with all the features that someone shipped where you talk about it and you explain it or like articles in general. But yeah, so for sure there is a lot that could be done and I would love to expand it beyond social media because you're right like building in public is also more than that, more than just socials.

Yeah, yeah definitely. I think a newsletter generator would be pretty awesome. Basically you choose like three four five of your posts and then get ChatGPT to generate a a little newsletter post for you. I think that would be pretty dope. And is the posting limited to just public repositories or does it also work with private ones as well?

It it also works on private ones. Actually this one yeah it's private. So basically yeah it's just you're giving permissions to this GitHub plugin to your repositories and you can actually select which repositories you want. So let me see if I can show you but basically yeah so here I selected all repositories so it's going to include private and public ones or I can do like only selected ones. For example you want only give access to the repository of your project and nothing else you can just select that one and this is going to work. So so yeah.

Gotcha awesome. Yeah, love that you can apply it to both. I have I have quite a bit of public and private repos so it'd be nice to be able to share both the things if I so choose. I guess another question, what was the the most challenging part so far I guess in building Buildshare? I know you've only started a few weeks worth but are there any big things you you ran through or or were fighting through while you were building this first iteration?

Hmm, so actually I think prompt engineering was the hardest part but simply because I don't like it. Like I'm I really don't like like working on prompts like there is like you need to know a lot about how to structure them, do a lot of trial and error. So and they still need to improve it also like so that was the part that was kind of hardest like and this is not something that I love doing but of course it's very important for this so I I took a lot of time to do this. So that's the first thing that comes to my mind. And after that I would say I can think of anything else that was like super challenging so far. Um actually working with GitHub plugins is super easy like I love the GitHub everything they they every feature that they have is just very very easy to use, like very well documented, works instantly so you can tell that they do products for for developers so that was pretty pretty fun to integrate.

Oh yeah, definitely. Their docs are some of the best and a lot of web3 projects cough cough can uh uh take an example from them. But I suppose if somebody were wanting to use Buildshare today or follow up or follow its progress what's the best way for folks to do that?

So to use it just go on buildshare.io and it takes two seconds to login, you just need GitHub basically and as as I show you like creating a new project is pretty straightforward. To stay up to date, just follow me on Twitter and there is also Buildshare page, so my Twitter is MattiaPomelli and the Buildshare page is buildshareio but actually like I just created it so I'm not posting anything there yet but I will also post there stuff so those are definitely the best two places.

Awesome and I will share all those resources in the YouTube description below, actually they should already be there as well as the accompanying blog post that will be coming out a little later this week. But yeah unfortunately we're close to time here, just want to thank you so much Mattia for coming on, really appreciate you taking the time during your busy week and sharing Buildshare with us. The universe, the universe wanted us to see Buildshare after all the power power struggles. It went well and then well thanks so much for having me it was fun. My pleasure, my pleasure. And before everybody leaves I just want to share the QR code for the form to fill out to claim your DevNTell NFT for being an attendee today. So typically I set a time limit of one hour for these but after some feedback from last week maybe that's not enough so going to push it half an hour so you'll have an hour and a half from now to be able to claim or to fill out this form to claim your NFT. Mattia I'll give you a separate link for being a speaker but I mean you're free to feel this one out too if you'd like. But yes you'll want to use a regular QR code scanner to scan this, go to de-form, fill out that form and you will be airdropped your NFT in a few days time. But yeah like I mentioned thank you again so much Mattia for coming on and yeah I'm happy we were able to get get this done. Happy Friday happy weekend, we'll catch you back here next week. Bye bye, cheers, bye.