I recently finished and support, now I’m working on a GPU-accelerated rendering backend.

- The Pen tool feels intuitive.

- I like how the Objects panel shows previews of each layer.

- It is nice to see clip-path support integrated well, and features such as converting text to outlines, and boolean operations - these seem like rare features.

Here's some critical feedback after using it:

- Keybindings to switch between tools would be useful, and they should be annotated on the tooltips

- I'd like to see zoom/panning supported with Ctrl +/- and panning when holding space and clicking/dragging.

- When editing groups of shapes, it is hard to select individual shapes in the group. Double-clicking switches to the Nodes tool, which is not exactly what I want. I'd like something where double-clicking a group goes into some sort of "Group Isolation" editing mode.

- When using the Pen tool, I'd like to be able to go back to tweak the previous points, such as adjusting the control points, etc.

- Undo in Pen mode does not undo the insertion of points in the path, instead of Undoes operations from before the shape was started.

- Text support seems limited, for example an embedded @font-face did not render correctly. Similarly for filter support. If the editor doesn't support these features I'd expect them to at least be rendered correctly by the browser, but it seems like SVG rendering here is independent.

For context, I got started with Illustrator 9 as a teenager (this is making me feel dated, it was released in 2000), and I'm very familiar with the Illustrator UX and find it intuitive.

When using Inkscape, the UX just feels slightly off, things like:

- Weird keybindings, e.g. pressing Ctrl +/- does not zoom/unzoom

- The golden path feels buggy. When launching the window is for some reason cropped to the top 1/8th of the screen and needs to be resized, and the artboard is tiny.

- Usability issues, such as selecting paths does not show their outline, and the layers window doesn't show a preview of what's in each layer

- Exported SVGs are needlessly verbose. This looks like it has gotten better but is still there. For example, exporting an SVG with two gradients actually puts four gradients in the file (combining with inheritance).

I'm sure that spending more time with it would help, and Inkscape does seem quite powerful, but UX is a big factor when I adopt new tools and Inkscape is lacking there.

I usually fall back to Illustrator and then clean up the resulting markup, or a text-based editor such as https://www.svgviewer.dev/

Your UX is quite polished, and your tool already supports more features than other ones I've found, good work!

For reference this is my project, https://github.com/jwmcglynn/donner, which has a web-based "editor" (currently just code-based editing) prototype here: https://jwmcglynn.github.io/donner-editor/

SVG is one of those things that has lots of potential but has been impacted by not-so-great tooling, it's my passion and I'm glad to see innovation in the space.

The challenge I had with Sourcegraph is that it's out of reach of developers working on personal projects. There isn't a hosted plan, and for my projects I can't easily open source them due to my employer.

I was really excited when the Sourcegraph App was released, since it allowed me to give Sourcegraph a try on my project without going through the complex self-hosted setup. I went as far as getting scip-clang working with my Bazel-based project, and then tried out the docker-compose setup on my home lab.

Now that code search was removed from the app, and this change, I'm concerned that I won't be able to use Sourcegraph for my personal projects in the future.

This is a missed opportunity. I think individual developers using products for personal projects are powerful advocates, since those developers may convince their employer to purchase the product. If I could I'd gladly pay, but I'm just one person and can't justify $5k/year.

If you had to ask someone how to open tickets? Create a short doc or wiki with those instructions.

That's a good way for even a junior engineer to start producing value, for established teams they often have tribal knowledge without realizing it.

Junior engineers aren't expected to do this alone, your senior engineers should be there to help you as you learn to do this yourself.

For me, it's still a bit intimidating asking questions to people 2+ levels above me, but the biggest thing I've learned is that those people want to help me. For more senior engineers, it's their job to help you: You're not wasting their time.

1. Raspberry Pi 3: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01CD5VC92

2. CP2102 USB TTL adapter: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B072K3Z3TL

3. Breadboard/Cables/LEDs/Resistors kit: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01IH4VJRI

4. microSD card: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001B1AR50

Note that I didn't need a microSD adapter since my laptop already has a SD card port, and the card linked has a microSD-to-SD adapter. Overall, this was $64 vs $98 for the above parts, and it all had free one-day shipping.