From one single tweet to the front page of HackerNews
TL;DR: Thank you Binni Shah, alexsnurnikov and @yarapavan!
It all started on Saturday, April 23rd. I just enabled SSL support in the morning, and later in the afternoon I was quietly working on some improvements of LibHunt. All of a sudden, I noticed a small surge of visits coming from Twitter. Usually, I have the Real-Time section opened when I’m working on a project. Of course, I was curious who the culprit was, so I instantly opened search.twitter.com, searched for “python.libhunt.com” and found this:
Basically, that single tweet sparked the fire. Of course, Binni Shah isn’t a random person. Her bio states:
Linux Evangelist, Malwares, Kernel dev. Security enthusiast, Jain, Philanthropist & reformist.
… and she has 21k followers. She seems like an authority in the tech world.
A bit later, someone, who I assume found “Awesome Python” through Binni’s tweet, shared it on Reddit.com/r/programming. Not after too long python.libhunt.com was among the top “hot” resources on that subreddit. That brought some considerable visits and interest by itself.
Even at that moment, I was pretty happy. The “/r/programming” community has more than 650,000 subscribers. However, about an hour later, I noticed some traffic coming from HackerNews. I checked the “new” section, and I saw that someone had submitted it there. The fact is, I already had done this 10 days ago, but it sunk receiving just 2 upvotes (one of them coming from a friend of mine). Hence, I didn’t have huge expectations this time. Most submissions usually reach the second page pretty quickly and then they get forgotten forever…
Nevertheless, this time it was different - maybe because it was Saturday, maybe because the submitter, @yarapavan HN karma 14K, has quite some authority. The post collected about a dozen upvotes while being on New-Page-1. Apparently, that was enough for Awesome Python to reach the homepage.
Not after too long, the Real-Time graph was showing 100+ concurrent visitors. That was awesome by itself, a great validation for what I’ve built. I believe, it is one of those factors that help a project reach the next level. It strengthens its authority, it gives a reason to people to write about it and refer to it. Consequently, that helps increase organic traffic and, hopefully, search visibility. For instance, within less than a day, python.libhunt.com started receiving referrals from all kind of diverse blogs and sites.
In the end, I believe that I’ve given life to something useful, and that’s the primary reason why my project has received all this attention. Of course, it wouldn’t happen by itself. Obviously, it requires an opinion leader to light the fire and a bit more… like a follower or two with some authority to spread the word.
So, again, lots of thanks to:
- Binni Shah — for being the opinion leader in this particular case and mentioning Awesome Python on Twitter.
- alexsnurnikov— for being the first follower, submitting to “/r/programming” and playing this crucial role.
- @yarapavan — for being the second follower, making the “crowd”, posting to HN and consequently making the news itself.
For those of you that are interested what LibHunt is, it is a platform for enlivening all those static awesome lists that currently live on Github. They are a collection of knowledge and expertise of many developers, and many people could benefit from them. LibHunt is the next step. It is be based on those list gems, yet it adds some vital features and functionalities — ordering by popularity, context-activity indicator, the ability to compare libraries, a modern UI, and many more to come.
The end goal? — creating the ultimate dev toolbox. As a developer, I have always been spending a considerable amount of time in researching my options and comparing them. Now, I will build a platform that will contribute to this particular area — finding new or alternative libraries to get our job done.
So far, there are four websites build on the top of LibHunt — Awesome Python, Awesome Ruby, Awesome JavaScript & Awesome PHP; however, several others are in the pipeline.
Thanks for the interest, and I will be more than happy to receive feedback, ideas or suggestions.
