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Curate your own GitHub project list (Building Apocode #7)

Curate your own GitHub project list (Building Apocode #7)
Photo by Praveen Thirumurugan / Unsplash

When learning a new programming language or framework, I like to create my own lists of interesting GitHub projects related to it.

One of the most helpful resources in that process has been Awesome Lists. These are community-curated lists of resources relating to a specific topic. For example, science fiction, artificial intelligence, mental health, or game development. They have proliferated over the past few years and become so popular that there is even an awesome list of awesome lists.

However, after visiting a list a few times, I always end up asking myself the following questions:

  1. Which GitHub projects have I already looked at?
  2. What did I think of them?
  3. Which projects have been added to the list since the last time I looked at it?
  4. Are there other GitHub projects that should be on this list but aren't?

(2) can be partially answered by starring interesting projects. Also, GitHub released the beta of Lists last year, making it easier to categorise starred repositories. Unfortunately, it is still impossible to mark projects as uninteresting and ignore them in future research.

(3) can be answered by looking at the history of the list, but this isn't straightforward.

(1) and (4) are very difficult to answer.

The solution

Recently, I set myself the challenge of creating and launching 10 micro-SaaS products in 100 days while building Apocode (a UK-based startup helping entrepreneurs create SaaS products without writing code). And since tracking GitHub projects has been a recurring issue of mine, I decided to dedicate my fifth micro-Saas to it.

Awesome Finder, launching today, makes it easy to create curated lists of GitHub projects. It works as follows:

1. A user creates a list, names it, and sets search parameters.

2. Behind the scenes, Awesome Finder collects the search results from GitHub using the GitHub search API.

3. Then the user reviews the list of projects and decides which ones should be included or excluded from the list.

4. Awesome Finder regularly reruns the search and adds new results to the review queue.

Compared to GitHub starring or manual list curation, this process has two main advantages:

  • Projects are reviewed only once (per list). No time is wasted going through projects the user has already reviewed.
  • Lists can easily be updated. Since Awesome Finder remembers the search criteria used to create the list, it will automatically discover new matching projects.

Feedback

Awesome Finder is in its infancy and only supports a limited number of search criteria at the time of this writing. I have added a feedback form so you can send feedback (good or bad) and suggestions directly from it.

And if you want to create similar SaaS products or follow the journey, you can join Apocode's product waitlist, subscribe to my blog, follow me on Twitter, or email me at nicolas@apocode.com