Devin’s use case — an IDE across the web
We’re interviewing our top users. Here’s the story of how a rising entrepreneur uses Point in his everyday workflow.
The Problem
As the CTO and co-founder of Quilt, Devin Morgan is a software engineer at heart that became an entrepreneur by trade. He uses a ton of keyboard shortcuts on IntelliJ, the IDE where his coding magic happens. These shortcuts save him valuable time as he’s rapidly building software for his startup.
However, Devin misses being hyper-efficient when he’s outside of his IDE. He hates writing long, repetitive messages to people when they ask him the same questions over chat, such as Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts, What’s App, Slack, and even his own platform Quilt.
“Basically,” Devin said, “people reach out to me from time to time and either ask how I’m doing or how Quilt is going, and it’s a pain in the ass to craft the same-ish message multiple times to different people. My solution was to remember the most recent conversation that I remember saying that and copy-pasting it.”
Devin needed a tool that could help him communicate as quickly as he could code.
The Solution
Point allows Devin to store snippets that he sends repeatedly and reuse them anywhere on the web, so that he doesn’t have to re-craft messages from scratch. Instead of hunting for an old conversation, copying his message, and then pasting it, Devin now uses Point to seamlessly find and insert a snippet with just a few keystrokes. After installing Point, he created a snippet of his long response to the “how are you doing?” question and used it in three conversations right away. He has other snippets like “about-quilt,” which automatically inserts an elevator pitch of his startup.
“Point reduces my cognitive load to write up the message,” said Devin. “I don’t want to type it up like it’s an original thought every time. I already spent time perfecting the response, so I shouldn’t need to do it again!”
Devin is so efficient that he takes it a step further — not only does he hate repeating the same message, he hates writing the same phrases over and over again. He creates snippets that automatically expand into full phrases. For example:
- btw → by the way
- fwiw → for what it’s worth
- imo → in my opinion
He even stashes emojis as Point snippets, since he views Windows’s emoji feature as “much less reliable.” He uses his “3ha” snippet to insert three of these bad boys whenever he wants: 😂😂😂
The Result
Over a two month period of using Point, Devin chose a total of 688 snippets. His snippets ranged in length anywhere from 2 to 1500 characters, and he used Point to save a grand total of 25,519 characters. That’s enough characters to write this article ten times in a row!
“Point is now a cornerstone in my workflow when using Chrome,” Devin remarked. “It’s legit integrated into my typing flow now and I want more opportunities to use it.”
