Ask HN: How do you keep track of new libraries/projects | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you keep track of new libraries/projects

1 pointoscardelben2 comments

I've been developing with Ruby for several years, and sometimes I fall in the trap of thinking that I know what the right tool for the job is, especially when we're talking about plugins and libraries. Yet everyday I stumble across new libraries that are better and are already followed by hundreds of persons that I didn't ever hear about.

Now I'm wondering how you hackers keep track of new libraries and projects. I'm particularly interested in Ruby and Rails projects but I think the discussion would benefit from a more general approach. Do you subscribe to some rss? Some aggregator like rubyflow.com? I'm curious to hear what you do.

In general I look daily on sites like HN and bookmark everything that looks interesting.<br> Then if I need some tool for something important, I always Google if there is something new in this area, just to make sure I don't miss it.<br /> When I was developing websites with RoR I was very active at the RoR mailing list(Ruby on Rails: Talk). Mostly helping out other people, but following lots of discussions and reading answers, when I found a question interesting, that I couldn't answer myself.<br /> So for example, when we got into serious trouble with full text search with Ferret, I knew already, that many others had changed to Sphinx and no problems with it. Took me one day to change the project and make the search work as expected.<br /> And of course on that mailing list you can ask others, very experienced RoR developers about specific tools they use for certain areas. But mostly somebody who wrote something new, announced this already there, mostly starting a discussion about pros and contras of his solution.<br />

I'm a contributor to the Changelog: http://thechangelog.com/

We use a couple of different things to hear about new stuff, but it's largely just keeping our ears open and bookmarking things.

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