Great guide. One thing that seems to be missing is something I see in a lot of README's: a list of the core tech stack being used in the repo. Good examples here https://github.com/undb-xyz/undb#-tech-stack and here https://github.com/steven-tey/novel#tech-stack. Did you already consider adding this as part of the guide and decide against it, or was it just not something you thought to add?
StackShare (https://stackshare.io/) now has a community of over one million developers sharing their tech stacks and advice on tools & technologies publicly. More recently, we launched our enterprise product called Private StackShare which helps companies automatically map out all the tech stacks they're using via Git integration. Eventually we believe that no developer in the world will make a technology decision without first checking StackShare, to see what others are using inside (private) and outside (public) of their company.
We're hiring a Developer Advocate to engage the community and help us create a brand new category of SaaS: tech stack intelligence. This role is primarily focused on content and community, and you'll be reporting directly to the CEO (me). You’ll have real input into product decisions and help drive product strategy by working closely with the leadership team.
Some Developer Advocate / Developer Evangelist experience is required.
Hey HN! We’ve been quietly testing a new feature on StackShare over the past year where we let people ask for advice on which tool they should use in a given scenario. Stack Overflow is the best for programming questions, but they don’t allow for opinion-based discussions about which tooling to use for different use cases. HN is great too whenever there happens to be a popular Ask HN thread related to picking tools, but they're pretty infrequent.
So we built a new experience just for getting Stack Advice! To ask for advice all you need to do is describe your situation, your constraints, tag the relevant technologies, and your request gets shared with a network of thousands of developers that have used the tools you're asking about. There are some great discussions happening already, over 1,000 advice threads so far! Would love to hear everyone's feedback :)
OP here- we’ve been working on this offering for a while now. The data available on StackShare has always been one of the most interesting aspects of what we’re building. We’ve generally stayed away from offering an API because we weren’t sure how we wanted to offer it and exactly what we wanted to offer. I mentioned this on Product Hunt yesterday- the last thing we wanted to do was open it up as a free service and then have to shut it down once it was time to start monetizing. So we decided to do this sustainably from the start; for the beta, we’re offering the API as a paid service.
The public data you see when browsing stackshare.io is a small fraction of what you get via the new API. We’ve built our own scrapers and crawling infrastructure to figure out the backend technologies companies are using via public sources and combined that with the technology graph we had already built up to create one high quality dataset. We tell you how/where we get all the data that we serve up and we have a lot more backend technologies than most other similar APIs.
Thanks for the feedback! Would love some examples of ones you think are general/intro- we're manually curating to a certain extent so we want to make sure we know which ones the community generally doesn't find useful. The idea is that if you're logged in, you'll see Decisions relevant to your stack.
The posts aren't meant to be high density, so that's intended :)
Low density is a good thing as long as it's combined with high focus.
My interpretation from the post title was that these would be stories about why certain tech was used on specific projects and just just posts about why so-and-so likes or dislikes such-and-such.
From the top listings right now, I consider these to be too broad/vague:
- JavaScript for People Who Hate JavaScript
- Rust 2018 is here… but what is it?
- Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs
- PyTorch 1.0 is out
- Microsoft Edge is moving to Chromium
Each of those are either (a) Intro to __ or (b) general news/announcements.
And these ones are on point:
- How Heap Built an Analytics Platform that Auto-Tracks Every User Event
- M3: Uber’s Open Source, Large-scale Metrics Platform for Prometheus
There were many more fluffy posts before I got to the second 'on point' article.
I suspect that the site is more broad than the post title and that over time as there is more content, that it can be more focused and find it's essence. For me, I already have too many sources of broad content that I don't see adding another destination. Wish you the best of luck and hope to cross paths again and see how the site has evolved. Cheers.
OP here- excited to show this to the HN community! Someone posted the intro blog post in another thread but our plan was to just show off the product so here it is! Decisions is a way to quickly explain a specific technology decision you made.
Twitter is great, blog posts are great, but we think there's an interesting medium (pun intended) that could be really helpful when you're trying to make a decision about a tool or putting together a workflow. Example: I like this one about payments because it's pretty descriptive https://stackshare.io/adrienjarthon/decisions/10114566434535....
We believe sharing technology decisions should be as commonplace as writing an organized and thorough README.md. Ultimately, our goal is to increase the net amount of knowledge about technology accessible to all developers, which in turn will help make you more productive at work.
Contributing Decisions gives you visibility amongst other developers who care about the tech you’re talking about, and gives you the opportunity to discuss the technical details associated with that decision.
As I mentioned in the other thread, our hope is that over time, you'll end up with this structured repository of discussions around technology problems/solutions for a wide range of use cases that you can come back to whenever you need help.
I really like the idea of it if you can get critical mass. One concern I'd have is: given that people's livelihoods are often on the line, how do you keep it from devolving into Quora marketer-speak over time?
Thanks! I think there will be a similar challenge here, but we have community moderators (as of launch) and pretty strict rules around self-promotion. Example: some vendors (tool makers) wanted to write Decisions about their own product, but we explained why that's not helpful to developers and they understood. In many ways HN is really good at this, so the hope is that we can let the community moderate itself which seems like less of a thing on sites like Quora.
It's better than I expected, with C as an option. You seem to be missing everything else I use: assembly, linker scripts, machine code (bare hex opcode bytes).
Founder of StackShare here- it's not a recruiting tool and it never has been. Used for recruiting, definitely. Companies link to StackShare all the time in job posts (even in the Who's Hiring thread) to show applicants the stack they'll work with. But we don't have a recruiting product nor market ourselves as one so not sure how we come across as that.
Not finding anything useful could be a fair point, but it depends on what you're looking for. If you've been trying to get a better understanding about a tool that you don't know about, I'd love to see a better resource (I don't know of any). If it's a tool that you already know about then you could certainly make the case if you want to do a full deep dive, consumer-reports style. But again I don't know of a single place to go for that.
Regarding your first point, there's no shortage of online courses and tutorials to help you when you're entering a new area of development which often go into the tools aspect. Curious- why don't those work for you? Here's a good one for React that does cover tools: https://reactforbeginners.com/
OP here- I agree that that discussions are more interesting. A question about a stack is actually something we encourage and will encourage more in the comments for Decisions. But there are still a lot of problem/solution combos that can be useful without a discussion attached (these usually come in the form of full blog posts).
Our hope is actually that over time, you'll end up with this repository of discussions around problems/solutions for a wide range of use cases that you can come back to whenever you need help.
I was just reflecting on this. If you agree that React is a net positive for software development (efficiency, creating complicated UIs faster), then you can make the case that Ads on Facebook have indirectly helped a lot of engineers and thus companies.
They had a problem, a piece of technology was created to solve it, and then released to the world, and now many others are able to solve problems using the same technology. Seems like this is exactly how open source should work (license issues aside).
The fact that this all comes back to Ads highlights the importance of Ads in the software development ecosystem IMO.
Worth noting that Google and Facebook have contributed a ton of open source to the world and they’re both built on ads. Amazon and Apple on the other hand do far less open sourcing and their businesses don’t rely on ads. Not saying there’s causation, but does make you wonder why that’s the case.
I mean, software companies will spin ads any way they can to get engineers interested. That’s their prerogative. It doesn’t mean any of it is true—the world is 100% worse off due to ads, and no amount of smooth scrolling animations is going to change that.
Why is this comment being downvoted? Can't anyone else see the poor taste in words? I'm not sure it deserves to be flagged but definitely worth calling out.
Yes, it is poor taste, unnecessarily insulting, and assumes 'we' == 'US'. "Worth calling out"? Nope. That puts unnecessary emphasis on it, and creates unnecessary discussion. Either the comment should be upvoted or downvoted. Readers are mature enough to decide that. I tend to downvote any complaints or discussion about moderation (including this one by myself if I could) because it is boring/offtopic read. YMMV.
Not gonna downvote you. I am from the US, and am deeply ambivalent about the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It may have ended the war sooner; it definitely killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese people. Not many of the European Allies said much at the time. That's war.
