As promised a week ago, I am sharing my conclusions from aggregating feedback on bots and development tools. These are the basis for how I continue to make machines work for us.
Even with the relatively small number of bots available today, for many people, the problem is filtering this quantity to find what they are looking for. Using the search function on the forum or google helps, but these options are far from optimal. A way to improve this is by offering better filtering tools.
The Sanderling IDE made it simpler to develop and operate bots and I will further advance here. I plan to make bot setup more straightforward, for example by offering to configure a bot without the need to edit a script.
People often expand their bots to issue alerts in specific situations, and the numerous questions about this functionality suggest that there is value in making this easier.
Development will become easier with improved documentation, but guidance for development also is based in no small part on the provided examples. After publishing bots based on different approaches to code structure and build workflow, the feedback helped me better understand the challenges people face when adapting those examples. These learnings will help me to change the examples to make development more accessible.
Another way to improve development is by providing better guidance when editing code. In the current development environment, developers have to bear the peculiarities of C# and .NET. The friction here can be reduced by introducing better static analysis and a simpler programming language.