HACKER Q&A
📣 poetincode

What Are Your Biggest Frustrations with Software Tools and Services?


What software tools or services (SaaS, self-hosted, or open source) are you using that just don’t cut it? Whether it’s UX friction, frustrating pricing models, missing features, poor developer experience, support challenges or anything else—I'd love to hear your experiences.

Your insights could inspire a better solution by someone in the community.

Regarding my inspiration to post this, I am just looking for a project idea, not necessarily commercial, with the potential of actual "users" unlike last projects/startup. I deeply appreciate your attention and comments :)


  👤 PaulHoule Accepted Answer ✓
Database administrator tools like pgadmin4. Postgres has maybe 30 kinds of artifact that are in a dropdown tree (e.g. stored procs, collations, etc.) but most of the time all I care about is tables but I have to ignore and click past so many things just to find the table I'm looking for.

I am always harassed about queries I didn't "save" but there isn't a model for saving queries that works with the way I do software development (e.g. I don't have a git repository full of SQL queries thought I might want to keep SQL queries in files in the same repo as my Java/Python/whatever and bring them in as resources)

Products like this don't respect the fact that I am thinking about how a few tables and/or a few rows fit together. I don't want to see a hairball graph of my whole database (e.g. SAP printed out their SQL tables UML style and it filled half the wall of a gymnasium) but I do want to see a piece of it I care about as a graph

All the time I want to see a few queries, rows and result sets at the same time but tools like this don't make that easy.

If I do

   select * from some_table
and get one row the columns are stacked horizontally so I can't see them all at once and have to scroll. I'd like to see one row stacked vertically so I can see it all at once and not have to scroll, scroll, scroll.

For extra credit I want a tool that works with document db's (JSON tables in postgres, arangodb, couchdb, etc.) and SPARQL databases.


👤 radonek
I hate the way GUI apps are devolving back to nineties. Resizable windows, clipboard, theming, menus, keyboard shortcuts… stuff that made computers easier to use is disappearing. Apps nowadays are created by graphic designers who don't know what color contrast is and UX specialists who never heard word ergonomy, directed by people who consider wheel reinventionalism to be height of innovation.

👤 billconan
I don't like youtube's ux. I have so many subscriptions, I want to organize them in folders and clicking on a folder, I should be able to see all updates in that folder.