Karpathy posted hackertube.org 5 days ago, and mentioned that it took him 2 hours to build. A day after another fellow posted hackerbooks.org https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50326821, and made it to the top of HN. Some hours after someone else made it to the top of HN with the same for wikis: https://wikihack.netlify.app/ I found particularly interesting the "Trends" section on https://hackerbooks.org/

That night, I set out to build something similar but for Repos.

So I built https://HackerRepos.fyi. There are 57,316 repositories and 667,508 mentions indexed.

I originally made three main sections: Top of all time, Most Recommended, and Trends - per HackerBooks inspiration.

It looked/felt good, so I wanted to take it further.

I am a big fan of https://github.com/trending, and frequent it often, looking for inspiration. So I built the "Trending now section" https://hackerrepos.fyi/#/trending section. Trending now gives in a quick colour-coded sentiment snapshot of the repos trending on HN, using a grid/map in the style of https://finviz.com/.

When you click on a repo, it gives you a summary of the chatter, a colour-coder tag (Favorable, Critical, Debated, Informational), a graph of the mentions over time and the comments below the graph.

I also added a section on every repo called "Where it’s used", to showcase real world use cases. I realized populating this section could be costly, so I placed it behind a paywall for those that care for it. Pro users can click "Find real-world uses", and the app goes and finds a real-world use case.

I am working on a few other features I want to ship, but they are not ready yet. For example, I want to build a reverse product-to-stack exploration feature, where a user could enter or describe a product, and the app could provide a set of stacks to fit it, and perhaps, supporting comments. Also, I want to build task-based comparisons. I have a task, and I am debating between some repos to use. I could describe the task and enter the repos I have in mind to solve for the task, and have the app suggest the better one.

But I am glad I stopped and I am posting this now, because it has been a long time since I have finally managed to actually ship something from start to finish. I have a folder full of projects I started and did not ship. As I was struggling with this yesterday, whether I should make this public now or keep fiddling with it, I went to Mass and the gospel was Luke 14:25-33. The following part struck me:

"And indeed, which of you here, intending to build a tower, would not first sit down and work out the cost to see if he had enough to complete it? Otherwise, if he laid the foundation and then found himself unable to finish the work, anyone who saw it would start making fun of him and saying, Here is someone who started to build and was unable to finish."

So here it is. I finished this little tower. I hope you enjoy it, find it helpful, and if you care for it, sponsor it.