Espruino target audience?

Ideally, I'd like Espruino to be used more professionally. I'd love to see it in a few geeky consumer products and exposed to the user - but I think that's unlikely :)

My problem is my work is driven by where I make money.

Companies do use Espruino, but on the whole they contribute very little back. They'll (maybe) buy one or two Espruino boards and ask for support on the forum, but will then stick the Espruino firmware on their own boards for production which means I don't make anything. Nobody licenses Espruino and very few companies have ever paid for support - which makes it a very bad deal for me.

So I have two types of customer:

• Personal/hobbist user: More laid back, buys one or two boards, asks the odd question (probably with full code) and is happy when answered, posts up what they've done which is great for publicity, and they also help other users.
  
• Commercial user: Often under time pressure, buys one or two boards but not more, asks a lot of questions, usually with no code and rarely posts what they're doing because it's some secret part of a product. Rarely helps others.
  
  

You can see why the personal one - right now - is a lot better for me and Espruino as a whole, so they're who I'm most interested in.

If commercial customers actually made me money - for instance they used Espruino boards in their products or paid for support - then I would definitely put more effort into that side of things.

That looks like it could change with Puck.js, but in the last few years I can only think of one company that made a big purchase of Espruino boards, but I know of several that are using the software on their custom hardware in commercial products.

The web IDE has been buggy lately

If you find anything that could help with that I'd be very interested to know - like what OS and if there are any log messages/errors in the console.

Very little has changed with the Web IDE itself in the last few months, so if there is some issue it could be related to a Chrome update.

Uncaught Error: String too big to convert to float

Are you using a custom build? that error would appear to be coming because of something in process.env (I suppose there's a small possibility that the git hash in that version just happened to be all numeric).

Gordon, I'm concerned that you've stretched yourself too thin. I would like to offer the friendly suggestion that you even go so far as to drop support for some things

I am stretched too thin - but I have a feeling you're suggesting I drop support for things that the majority of my users use and focus on what a small number of people want - which is the exact opposite of what I should be doing.

I'm not stupid - if the majority of people really wanted the CLI over the Web IDE then I'd be spending more time on that - but it seems like they don't, and most of the rest find the current CLI works well for their needs.

If you really want support for some feature for your company then get in touch and get them to pay me to implement it. Or if your company has placed an order for hundreds of boards then absolutely - I'm willing to go out of my way to make sure things work smoothly.

... and yes, there are a lot of tests for the main Espruino. The IDE/CLI end up being a lot more painful to write useful tests for though - I'm not convinced that'd be a particularly good use of my time.