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Show HN: a Yelp for iOS developers

3 points by khitcher ↗ HN
I came up with this idea "a Yelp for developers" when talking with my colleagues.

My hypothesis is that, it would be very helpful if we know more about a library before choosing to use it. It's similar to that we want to know more about a restaurant by checking Yelp before visiting it.

For example, there're a lot of videos on Youtube advocating how great AsyncDisplayKit (an performant UI library for iOS) is. But it's hard to tell how prod-ready it is. Instead of investing in time to try it out, it would be awesome if I can know about how other people feel about using it.

Following this hypothesis, I put together a prototype to showcase the idea:

http://branchtip.com/

As an iOS engineer by day, it's currently only for iOS, just so that I can contribute some reviews to it.

What do you think of this idea? Feedback would be really appreciated.

Cheers, - Kenny

4 comments

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nautical
Generally "how good the library is?" is decided at our firm by number of stars/forks etc, frequency at which developers are responding to open bugs etc.
catchmeifyoucan
I don't think this is a bad idea. I usually go to Github, perform a search and sort by stars or NPM popularity. This would be another alternative.
khitcher
This is exactly how I currently do it.

I found how inefficient this is when I talked about AsyncDisplayKit with my friends. My friends literally told me the anecdotes he heard from Pinterest and convinced me that it is not production-ready our project, even if it gets a lot of stars on github.

I figure that knowledge like this could be very helpful for a broad audience.