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Launch HN: Openbase (YC S20) – reviews and insights for open-source packages

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Re: Launch HN: Openbase (YC S20) – reviews and insights for open-source packages

#51

Post by liorgrossman »

neximo64 wrote: post #47

Nice, now we can review someone's open source contributions they usually worked for free on.

I feel you, as I have tremendous respect and appreciation to open-source maintainers.

Nevertheless, I think most developers already "review", critique, and share their opinion of open-source libraries loud and proud. They just don't have a dedicated platform to do that.

Like most developers, I've been using dozens of open-source libraries, it's natural that I'll form some sort of opinion about them. If I'm like most developers, I'll even have some very strongly held opinions and preferences.

I will like some packages, and hate others. I'll find some documentation great, and other unreadable. I will insist one project is complex, and the other is easy to use. That's all fine.

IMHO, the fact that a piece of software was created for free, doesn't mean I shouldn't have the right to express my experience and opinions about that software, good or bad. With Openbase, we just want to give developers the ability to easily learn from the experience of other developers, and share their own experience with various libraries.

Re: Launch HN: Openbase (YC S20) – reviews and insights for open-source packages

#52

Post by liorgrossman »

jacques_chester wrote: post #49
liorgrossman wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a really interesting thought, we've never thought of this direction! Are there any successful products/companies with such business model (providing testing and certificates for money)

I think the reference examples would be certificate authorities, ratings agencies, Underwriters Laboratories, ISO9000 or SCAMPI inspectors/auditors, organic/kosher/halal/GMO-free food stamp companies etc. Selling quality marks can be quite lucrative, but you'd definitely need to think about exactly what people buy. And definitely think hard about deep insurance.

Awesome, I'm honestly not deeply familiar with most of those industries (let alone maybe credit rating agencies), but this is definitely a model that we need to explore. Thanks!

Re: Launch HN: Openbase (YC S20) – reviews and insights for open-source packages

#56

Post by liorgrossman »

aflag wrote: post #53

It'd be interesting if there was some way to measure user satisfaction per release. It would be nice to know which versions are working well for people and which ones are breaking things.

We were actually toying with the idea of showing vertical lines for releases on the various charts. So for example: # of open issues over time, and you can see if it correlates with a major release.

Identifying user satisfaction automatically is more tricky (sentiment analysis, which would be amazing, but we don't have the resources to do that well).

For now, one of the things we might do is to ask people to specify a version whenever they rate/review a package (or somehow deduce that automatically based on the date of review, which would not be as accurate...)

Re: Launch HN: Openbase (YC S20) – reviews and insights for open-source packages

#57

Post by darwinwhy »

liorgrossman wrote: post #36
jerrygoyal wrote: post #32

I've been doing js development for years and feel the same pain when I need to look for the npm package with the right balance of functionalities,size,active development,popularity etc. A dedicated site for package recommendation would definitely save lots of time, currently, I use npmtrends.com for this. I quickly checked for packages on openbase.io for rendering table and found out there were packages only for vuej…

Thank you, we all share the same pain with package search. The categories curation in Openbase includes a category, but also a framework. So as you mentioned, under Table libraries, you could have React, Vue, Svelte libraries etc. We currently filter those by framework, but unfortunately, we didn't have the time to fully implement this page prior to the launch. What should be in this page is a dropdown where you can…

Ruby toolbox has a wonderfully simple way of crowdsourcing it -- categorizing a package is as simple as submitting a small yaml PR, e.g. https://github.com/rubytoolbox/catalog/pull/417/files

Re: Launch HN: Openbase (YC S20) – reviews and insights for open-source packages

#58

Post by ldd »

liorgrossman wrote: post #46
ldd wrote: post #43

Does this include typescript projects? i couldn't find my own.[0] Also, I can see my two most popular packages ( 40 stars[1] and 14[2] respectively), and I've realized that not updating them frequently probably hurts. The thing is, what about bots like dependabot? I have one or two other packages that auto update and close issues quickly because they have some bots helping out, and I was wondering if you took that in…

Thanks! We currently only cover npm packages (not all GitHub repos), does vscode-jq have an npm package? We currently don't have any special handling for bots, but this is on the pipeline. Same goes for consolidating contributors (sometimes the same person shows up as 2 different GitHub users, you can see that on GitHub too). Bundle size is a big one for us, highly prioritized. Testing isn't, though, what would you l…

aha! covering npm packages makes sense. I briefly forgot that I hadn't publish that one on npm. I wonder if vscode extensions are published on npm... umm...

I'm glad you have all those future features planned.

As for testing, I think that badges are often times not enough. I'd like to see if tests exist at all in the first place, and the quality or helpfulness of those tests. But maybe I'm in the minority for that, so ask other users for confirmation.

:D

Re: Launch HN: Openbase (YC S20) – reviews and insights for open-source packages

#59

Post by liorgrossman »

darwinwhy wrote: post #57
liorgrossman wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you, we all share the same pain with package search. The categories curation in Openbase includes a category, but also a framework. So as you mentioned, under Table libraries, you could have React, Vue, Svelte libraries etc. We currently filter those by framework, but unfortunately, we didn't have the time to fully implement this page prior to the launch. What should be in this page is a dropdown where you can…

Ruby toolbox has a wonderfully simple way of crowdsourcing it -- categorizing a package is as simple as submitting a small yaml PR, e.g. https://github.com/rubytoolbox/catalog/pull/417/files

I didn't know that (and BTW Ruby-Toolbox is a great source of inspiration)

I think the challenge with that is that there's no standardization of categories. Both GitHub and npm have the concept of "topics/keywords" that developers can choose. Problem is that every maintainer chooses slightly different keywords, so it becomes ineffective as a tool for discovery.

We still haven't fully figured out what the optimal solution might be like.

Re: Launch HN: Openbase (YC S20) – reviews and insights for open-source packages

#60

Post by liorgrossman »

ldd wrote: post #58
liorgrossman wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! We currently only cover npm packages (not all GitHub repos), does vscode-jq have an npm package? We currently don't have any special handling for bots, but this is on the pipeline. Same goes for consolidating contributors (sometimes the same person shows up as 2 different GitHub users, you can see that on GitHub too). Bundle size is a big one for us, highly prioritized. Testing isn't, though, what would you l…

aha! covering npm packages makes sense. I briefly forgot that I hadn't publish that one on npm. I wonder if vscode extensions are published on npm... umm... I'm glad you have all those future features planned. As for testing, I think that badges are often times not enough. I'd like to see if tests exist at all in the first place, and the quality or helpfulness of those tests. But maybe I'm in the minority for that, s…

Hehe :)

A few other people asked about testing, too, but it's going to be challenging to build something that works reliably at scale with different codebases and testing frameworks.

But I think I got the idea of what you're looking for now. This will help us better model this feature if we end up implementing it.

Thanks for the feedback!

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