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 :)
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.
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.
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.
Absolutely loved doing this! Thanks for being such a great sport. So many topics we could have spent hours talking about. The whole “what would Facebook have looked like, had it been built on the cloud” segment deserves its own episode :)
We’re on a mission to create the best place for engineers to figure out how to piece together their tech stack. Our vision is to transform the way that all SaaS tools and infrastructure are bought and sold.
We're a small distributed team of 5, spread out across the US. Our Stack: Ruby/Rails/React/PostgreSQL https://stackshare.io/stackshare.
How we work:
Every engineer owns and is responsible for the products they build (e.g. Stack News). Before writing any code, the engineer tagged to the product writes a blog post announcing it to the StackShare community. From there, they spec out the product in detail and get feedback from at least one other engineer. Once the initial version of the product is built they ship it to a small group of beta testers, gather feedback, and iterate. Once the product has shipped to production, this engineer is then responsible for monitoring the metrics that matter for this product and iterating to improve it. Since we're building a product for engineers, we believe in letting our engineers work on things that interest them and giving them ownership over these products.
Yeah, totally on me for letting this expire. Sorry everyone :/ Lesson learned. We may switch to Let's Encrypt once they add wildcard support, which seems to be next year.
We’re on a mission to create the best place for engineers to figure out how to piece together their tech stack. Our vision is to transform the way that all SaaS tools and infrastructure are bought and sold.
We're a small distributed team of 5, spread out across the US. Our Stack: Ruby/Rails/React/PostgreSQL https://stackshare.io/stackshare.
How we work:
Every engineer owns and is responsible for the products they build (e.g. Stack News). Before writing any code, the engineer tagged to the product writes a blog post announcing it to the StackShare community. From there, they spec out the product in detail and get feedback from at least one other engineer. Once the initial version of the product is built they ship it to a small group of beta testers, gather feedback, and iterate. Once the product has shipped to production, this engineer is then responsible for monitoring the metrics that matter for this product and iterating to improve it. Since we're building a product for engineers, we believe in letting our engineers work on things that interest them and giving them ownership over these products.
We’re on a mission to create the best place for engineers to figure out how to piece together their tech stack. Our vision is to transform the way that all SaaS tools and infrastructure are bought and sold.
We've recently launched a new product called Stack News which you may have seen here on HN: https://stackshare.io/news.
We're a small distributed team of 4, spread out across the US. Our Stack: Ruby/Rails/React/PostgreSQL https://stackshare.io/stackshare.
How we work:
Every engineer owns and is responsible for the products they build (e.g. Stack News). Before writing any code, the engineer tagged to the product writes a blog post announcing it to the StackShare community. From there, they spec out the product in detail and get feedback from at least one other engineer. Once the initial version of the product is built they ship it to a small group of beta testers, gather feedback, and iterate. Once the product has shipped to production, this engineer is then responsible for monitoring the metrics that matter for this product and iterating to improve it.
We’re on a mission to create the best place for engineers to figure out how to piece together their tech stack. Our vision is to transform the way that SaaS tools and infrastructure are bought and sold.
We're a small distributed team of 4, spread out across the US. Our Stack: Ruby/Rails/React/PostgreSQL https://stackshare.io/stackshare.
How we work:
Every engineer owns and is responsible for the products they build. Before writing any code, the engineer tagged to the product writes a blog post announcing it to the StackShare community. From there, they spec out the product in detail and get feedback from at least one other engineer. Once the initial version of the product is built they ship it to a small group of beta testers, gather feedback, and iterate. Once the product has shipped to production, this engineer is then responsible for monitoring the metrics that matter for this product and iterating to improve it.
We’re on a mission to create the best place for engineers to figure out how to piece together their tech stack. Our vision is to transform the way that SaaS tools and infrastructure are bought and sold.
We're a small distributed team of 4, spread out across the US. Our Stack: Ruby/Rails/React/PostgreSQL https://stackshare.io/stackshare.
How we work:
Every engineer owns and is responsible for the products they build. Before writing any code, the engineer tagged to the product writes a blog post announcing it to the StackShare community. From there, they spec out the product in detail and get feedback from at least one other engineer. Once the initial version of the product is built they ship it to a small group of beta testers and gather feedback and iterate. Once the production version is done the engineer is then responsible for creating the analytics reports and tracking success of that product and iterating to improve it.
Stars are useful to gauge interest. At StackShare, we rank most everything by number of stacks- meaning usage (https://stackshare.io/javascript-ui-libraries). Worth noting that we just added GitHub stats to OSS pages (not our rankings), mostly because many new tools aren't actually being used in production yet, but there's a lot of interest in them.