Re:Show HN: I'm tired of sharing code using PasteBin and Sla...
by moeen-mahmud on Friday January 03, 2025 @02:26PM
(#42588671)
Thank you for your detailed comment and for mentioning the Application Error. Did you land on my page, or was the error blocking it? Please tell me so I can fix that.
You address your thoughts. The snippet folder just works fine, but I was thinking something about real-time, like chatting. I was thinking of making it self-host as an alternative to PasteBin and GithubGist, not only for extensions. But your insight is good. The problem with Slack or Microsoft Teams is the same. People don't even bother to format it; maybe they don't have time to do it. That was the actual pain point for me as well.
Could you tell me more about how I can improve it? Most importantly if it can bring up a better solution compared to Slack, PasteBin, and in-repository "/snippet" folder, would you use it?
I think I normally just encourage my coworkers to push the branch (to Github, Gitlab, etc.) to share larger snippets. Smaller stuff, `/snippet` works alright.
But I think the bigger issue with any tool is that corporate isn't going to want company IP uploaded or put into a random website. (This is already the case for a "PasteBin", too; the companies I've worked at wouldn't want me using that, either.) That said, I see this rule violated … a lot. More nowadays with the litany of LLM stuff out there. So, that "self hosted" feature would almost certainly be a requirement, but hosting small tools like this is a high barrier to adoption vs. a process like Slack or Github that has some small friction, but otherwise works.
> Pain points in your current code-sharing process?
Honestly I think the biggest pain point I have with sharing in Slack is that other people don't seem to know how to use Slack. You'll get a code snippet not in a `/snippet`, not even in a code block, just variable-width normal paragraph text.
(The other pain point is that Slack corrupts code-block contents in some cases. ("a known bug here […] currently being investigated by our engineering team […] don't have a timeline for a fix just yet" … the bug has been around for years, so yeah…))