We're building Cortex (https://www.getcortexapp.com/) to solve this problem :) We help you track all your microservices and integrate with all your 3rd party tooling to build a single pane of glass for your architecture. Happy to give you a demo if you're interested!
We're new customers of Cortex at my workplace and I can't recommend it enough. Its delivering a lot of value to us, mainly around keeping track of service "quality" metrics. Team is very responsive and is constantly improving the app. Big fan!
We’re the co-founders of Cortex. Cortex provides engineering teams with growing architectures an easy way to explore what services exist, understand how they depend on each other, and unlock additional insights through integrations with tools such as Slack and Pagerduty.
To prevent knowledge from going stale, Cortex enables developers to define information about their services alongside the code in a standard OpenAPI file. Integrations can be built on top of Cortex’s data, enabling functionality such as a Slackbot that can list your service’s runbooks, automated alerts when a service your team depends deprecates an API, or a real time overview of your Pagerduty on-call rotation for a service.
Cortex makes an immediate impact for an engineering org:
1. It's easy to lose track of which teams use your service. Cortex helps prevent outages by automatically notifying all of the service's consumers (via Slack & email) when an API changes.
2. Architecture diagrams are never up to date. By defining dependencies next to your code, Cortex makes it easier to maintain your service dependency graph - speeding up new-dev onboarding and operational triage.
3. Documentation and knowledge is scattered across people and tools. Cortex's Slackbot integration allows anyone to quickly find information without digging through code and talking to stakeholders.
4. Integrating Cortex is simple - curl an OpenAPI file to Cortex as part of your build process and the graph is automatically updated.
Cortex is simple to set up, low overhead, and makes documentation useful in day-to-day operations - instantly improving engineering process. Let us know if you have any questions, and we’d love to hear from you!
true, thanks for the feedback! I agree it is hard to understand the product simply from looking at the first page, we have an about page at http://www.homeroom.me/about and screenshots at https://angel.co/homeroom, but we'll definitely create some sort of video or demo where we can show teachers how exactly the website is used.
My two friends and I recently started an edtech started called Homeroom (it's live at homeroom.me) to promote collaboration and discussion in the classroom. It's a free online website that acts as a forum for students and teachers to answer each others' questions and discuss classroom content. We launched about three days ago and we've gotten about 900 total users including students just in a few schools we've reached out too in the bay area.
Does anyone have any advice on how to best reach out to teachers in other districts? We've been cold emailing teachers for now and seem to have a hit or miss with them. When we get a chance to explain ourselves teachers are really interested and we can usually get them to sign up with a class. Any advice would be much appreciated! More detailed info can be found at https://angel.co/homeroom.
Try your institution. Ask around. That's the best way to grow. But like the other person said, there is already Piazza. There is also edX which many top-tier universities are beginning to use. There is also BlackBoard. The high-ed market is pretty crowded and fragmented to me. For example, some departments choose to use BlackBoard while some don't care at all. Most of the time it's up to the professor to choose. Think for a bit. The actual solution to these question is not all that subtle, but you need a solid product that people can rely on first. You need a PaaS and a SaaS.
Your product sounds like Piazza. My computer science department uses it extensively - combination Q&A, announcements, and a sort of ticketing system for the TAs. It's a great tool. It's a powerful and innovative place to take fairly standard web application technology.
Why should I use your product instead of Piazza?
If you believe you can beat Piazza, then figuring out how Piazza got its marketshare might be a good place to start. I gather they have decent penetration in the higher ed market.
Thanks a lot for the feedback. My name is Abhishek Fatehpuria and I'm also a cofounder with Homeroom.
Theres a couple reasons why we think we're better than piazza.
1) Our discussion software yields higher quality discussion by having a more steady stream and well organized posts.
2) We're releasing more features which enables even more collaboration and discussion. Piazza only goes as far as posts and answers. We are going to do a lot more very soon.
3) Our target market right now has actually been the K12 market. We find that the softwares in that space right now are not that good and its incredibly fragmented.
That being said, I use piazza in school and I love it, and we know its pretty entrenched already in the higher-ed not K12 market.
Please let us know if you have more questions/feedback
You should get in touch with teachers' unions, Boards of Education, and classroom supply stores. If there's some way you can partner with textbook companies, that might also be an indirect path to users.
You should also check out Q&A sites or forums that have sections for educators to ask one another questions. There may even be teachers looking for you, and they might be congregating there.
