liorgrossman

Congrats on your re-launch - nice work!

At Openbase.com we're building the star count charts by using the GitHub GraphQL API (as we use it for other things like collecting stats about commits, issues and PRs).

Looking at how star-history works, seems like you opted for using the GitHub REST API - what are the upsides / downsides of using the REST API?

Hey everyone, I’m Lior, part of the team that builds Openbase.com. We thought of sharing our new product with you. It’s called dev.page and it’s an all-in-one developer page with all your info, projects and links.

Having spent the past couple of years working with developers, we’ve noticed developers have so many different online profiles nowadays: GitHub, GitLab, StackOverflow, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Medium, DEV, etc. What we didn’t find, though, is a good place for developers to showcase their profiles, links, and information. While there are link aggregators like Linktree and Bio Link, we felt they are geared more towards influencers on Instagram, and less towards developers.

To make dev.page easy to use for developers, we decided to start with GitHub signup, so you can get a page up and running quickly with some data from GitHub, then customize it later.

In your dev page, you can include the basic info you’d expect. For your bio, we’ve included markdown support, so you can style it the way you’d like, or even copy parts of your GitHub README. Most importantly, you can easily add links to your GitHub, GitLab, StackOverflow, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Discord, DEV, Medium, and other profiles.

We’d love to hear your thoughts about dev.page and what we can do to improve it.

Openbase is hiring! Our mission is to help developers choose among millions of open-source packages so they can build amazing products faster. And as of today, we are serving 500K developers every month. We’re a lean but agile team, backed by YC and the founders/CEOs of Heroku, Netlify, Docker, Algolia, Twitch, and Yelp.

5+ years experience | Remote OK/North America time zones | US Citizen or VISA

Sr. Frontend Engineer Sr. Backend Engineer Sr. Full Stack Engineer Developer Advocate

https://openbase.com/careers

Our Stack: AWS and Netlify TypeScript Node.js Express PostgreSQL Apollo GraphQL React Parcel

Openbase is hiring! Our mission is to help developers choose among millions of open-source packages so they can build amazing products faster. And as of today, we are serving 500K developers every month. We’re a lean but agile team, backed by YC and the founders/CEOs of Heroku, Netlify, Docker, Algolia, Twitch, and Yelp.

5+ years experience | Remote OK/North America time zones | US Citizen or VISA

Sr. Frontend Engineer Sr. Backend Engineer Sr. Full Stack Engineer Developer Advocate

https://openbase.com/careers

Our Stack: AWS and Netlify TypeScript Node.js Express PostgreSQL Apollo GraphQL React Parcel

Openbase (YC20) is hiring! Our mission is to help developers choose among millions of open-source packages so they can build amazing products faster. And as of today, we are serving 500K developers every month. We’re a lean but agile team, backed by YC and the founders/CEOs of Heroku, Netlify, Docker, Algolia, Twitch, and Yelp.

5+ years experience | Remote OK/North America time zones | US Citizen or VISA

Sr. Frontend Engineer Sr. Backend Engineer Sr. Full Stack Engineer Developer Advocate

https://openbase.com/careers

Our Stack: AWS and Netlify TypeScript Node.js Express PostgreSQL Apollo GraphQL React Parcel

Openbase is hiring! Our mission is to help developers choose among millions of open-source packages so they can build amazing products faster. And as of today, we are serving 500K developers every month. We’re a lean but agile team, backed by YC and the founders/CEOs of Heroku, Netlify, Docker, Algolia, Twitch, and Yelp.

5+ years experience | Willing to relocate to SF Bay Area post COVID | US Citizen or VISA

Sr. Frontend Engineer Sr. Backend Engineer Sr. Full Stack Engineer Developer Advocate

https://openbase.com/careers

Our Stack: AWS and Netlify TypeScript Node.js Express PostgreSQL Apollo GraphQL React Parcel

Thank you! Right now we support JavaScript, but we do work on adding additional languages like Python, Go, Java and Rust.

Thank you!

Absolutely.

First, we are working on surfacing open-source security advisories over the next couple of months in Openbase.

Second, we're still figuring out ways to flag other security concerns, such as 2FA, newly appointed maintainers, suspicious activity, etc. (this is to be expected in the longer term)

Hi everyone!

I'm Lior, one of the makers of Openbase (https://openbase.com). We help developers choose the right open-source packages with user reviews and insights about packages' popularity, maintenance, and more.

I started Openbase to solve my own problem - in a world with over a million open-source packages, finding the right package is hard! Whether I was looking for an NLP, charting, or math libraries, I was spending a lot of time researching and evaluating various libraries, trying to find the most maintained and popular one to fit my needs.

I first launched Openbase in May 2019, and it quickly grew from 0 to 500,000 visitors/mo. We were part of the Y Combinator Summer 2020 program, have recently raised funding, and today we were fortunate enough be featured on VentureBeat and TechCrunch, so we are very excited!

The starting point of building Openbase was gathering data from npm and GitHub - from versions and dependencies, to commits, pull requests, maintainers and tried to figure out what insights we could surface that could help developers choose the right package. We ended up adding automated insights like star count over time, commit frequency, time between major/minor versions, average time to resolve issues and PRs, percent of commits by the community, dependency insights, and more. Here's what the insights page looks like: https://openbase.com/js/react

We decided not to stop there, and allow our users to discover the best packages for performing each task and compare them side-by-side. We've already manually curated several hundreds categories, such as CSS frameworks, OAuth packages, and HTTP request libraries: https://openbase.com/categories/js/best-javascript-frontend-...

Lastly, we've built a reviews platform that allows developers to share their experience working with various libraries with other developers. To throw in even more fun to the mix, we added badges like "Great documentation", "Performant", and "Hard to use" (check it out: https://openbase.com/js/vue). To date, you can already enjoy tens of thousands of ratings and reviews on Openbase.

The product is 100% free of course. In the future, we want to allow for paid promotion of packages - limiting it to a single, clearly-marked promoted package for each category. We would surface the promoted package, but the package ratings, reviews, insights, and metrics are obviously untouched. We believe this kind of balanced approach could make Openbase a sustainable company, while not impairing the user experience.

The team and I would really love to hear your thoughts about Openbase and how we can improve it!

Openbase | Founded in 2019, backed by Y Combinator and some of the world’s top investors. We help developers choose amongst millions of open-source packages so they can build amazing products faster!

We're based in San Francisco and currently hiring our Core Team!

Our stack: AWS, Netlify, TypeScript, Node.js, Express, PostgreSQL, Apollo GraphQL, React, and Parcel.

Open Positions (Must have a VISA and be located or willing to relocate to SF Bay Area post-Covid) - Frontend Engineer - Backend Engineer - Full Stack engineer - Developer Advocate

Apply online at https://openbase.io/careers

Openbase | San Francisco, CA | Frontend+Backend+Fullstack Engineers, Developer Advocate | Full Time | https://openbase.io

Openbase helps developers choose among millions of open-source packages - so they can build amazing products faster.

The company was founded in 2019 and is backed by Y Combinator and some of the best investors in the industry.

We're growing fast, currently serving almost 400,000 developers monthly, and are now hiring our 3rd and 4th engineers, as well as our first developer advocate!

Our stack includes AWS, Netlify, PostgreSQL, TypeScript, Node, Apollo GraphQL, React, styled-components, Parcel

We offer great startup culture and energy, unparalleled impact and autonomy, and the opportunity to build something that helps millions of developers.

To apply, please visit https://angel.co/company/openbaseio or email careers@openbase.io

Watched the walkthrough and it looks sweet. What kind of static site generators do you support under the hood?

Awesome, thanks for the suggestions. Not sure how we missed Svelte (?!) I'll be sure to add those to the frontend framework category

Thank you for your feedback!

1. Nope, we currently have no way to edit what's in the overview page, so unfortunately you'll need to edit your README file to add additional links.

2. In general, we're going to use an approach similar to BundlePhobia where we would show the gzipped/uncompressed file of the final file, but it does make sense to allow maintainers to flag this (and other information) as wrong.

3. Our search engine is still work in progress. We started with the npms implementation, added additional layers of information from our dataset, and will iteratively add more and more factors to search results ranking. Unfortunately, we still can't grant for a specific package to be shown in the search autocomplete. We are, however, adding a "search result page" that would show more than the 9 results that you see in the autocomplete.

Indeed, currently it's curated manually! Would love to get suggestions for more libraries we can add to that category!

You're right about the selecting categories from the sidebar not updating the URL, we haven't implemented the routing yet, that is something that we'll implement soon.

Wow, showing a graph of user ratings over time would be amazing (once we have enough data)

That's a great point. Showing project funding is something we had in mind (and in the mockups) but didn't make it to the MVP. We would probably have to integrate with Open Collective and other data sources.

I think it would be a good start, but would still require some human vetting. We played with some simple NLP solutions (trying to run TF-IDF on the keywords/description/readme of packages to determine the category), the results weren't great honestly, so we opted of curating everything manually for now.

No auditing capability at the moment, sorry. We focus on helping developers discover and choose packages.

Thanks!

Thank you!

Yeah, preventing fake reviews is a tough challenge faced by much larger companies, like Amazon, Google and Facebook.

I don't think anyone has been able to 100% prevent those, so it's still work in progress.

I guess once we cannot do this ourselves, we're going to bring on additional team members to help with this, and once this is not enough, we'll have to use some combination of moderators (not very scalable), crowdsourcing (let users report suspicious reviews), and technology (identify and surface suspicious reviews).

We honestly don't know yet, but we know it's going to be a priority.

Thank you! Annual surveys are very interesting to read to see the macro trends, but as you mentioned they can't keep up with the pace of the JS ecosystem. Furthermore, they cover the major categories (e.g. big frameworks or tooling), but cannot cover the hundreds of different categories that we use on a regular basis (HTTP request library, logging library, tooltip library, XML parsing library, etc.)

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!

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.

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...)

Thank you. You mean a percentage (77%), like the one you usually see on a README badge?

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!

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.

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 like to see about testing that isn't covered by badges? (e.g. test coverage, passing/failing, etc.)