Introducing AngularHunt

Platform for developers to rate and discuss about Angular projects.

This is our story how we launched AngularHunt a platform for developers to rate and discuss about open source angular projects.

We at Aviabird have been working/open-sourcing with Angular (2.x+) for more than an year now.

We have released and open-sourced Yatrum & AngularSpree both written in Angular 2.x. Both these projects have got more than 130 stars on Github in a short time.

I even got the opportunity to meet a lot of cool folks at ng-conf this April, in Salt Late City, Utah. Developers got excited when they saw these projects and even starred them which was a nice feeling.

That’s me with Igor Minar(angular project lead) after his keynote.

I would be writing about my experience in ng-conf in a separate blog post. There is too much to share on that experience.

We worked on Yatrum & AngularSpree in a serial order. First we worked on Yatrum and released it in the community for feedback. It is an application for travellers where they could create trips to share with the world. We got mixed reactions mostly people complaining about the pathetic load time. Still getting such overwhelming response the community was something we experienced for the first time. We later worked a lot on speed and lazy loading. It’s a lot better now.

After we were done with Yatrum, we worked on our next open source project AngularSpree. AngularSpree is a front-end application for SpreeCommerce. SpreeCommerce is an E-Commerce framework in Ruby On Rails. We thought why not take the API’s which are the best in currently available open source options and build on top of it one of the most stable and robust open-source E-Commerce front-end application. We also released this in the community for feedback and we’ve are thrilled 🎉🎉🎉 with what people have to say about it.

An Email which made our day, btw Pankaj is my Co-Founder 😎.

SpreeCommerce team also liked it and they had some nice things to say about it too.

After I asked these guys if I could post about AngularSpree in their slack channel.

This made our day😎.

Now how did AngularHunt happen ?

By now you must be wondering how did AngularHunt come about. Okay, I think it’s the right time to disclose this.

While we were working on these projects we were excited about reaching to the community. We used to literally plan it in our free time about how to reach as many developers as possible so that we could get maximum feedback.

We knew AngularExpo was a decent platform to reach the community. We noticed projects which got featured on this platform got good feedback. Keeping that in mind we tried to reach the admin in every way possible. Of course this happened after we failed to get any attention through the usual way of submitting projects via google form.

After many(3 I guess) emails I got a response stating quality reasons for not featuring the projects on AngularExpo. We were confused since these projects have more than 100 stars and people don’t hate them if not love them dearly. Anyways, we were sure it was not quality for which our projects got rejected. I don’t wanna waste time into what those reasons could be and how fair they were.

Hence, AngularHunt was born out of frustration.

AngularHunt Inspired from Producthunt

On AngularHunt you could rate, discuss(coming soon) and checkout open source angular projects.

We believe we should have least control over what get’s featured, so we are relying on the Upvote count(more robust algorithm in future coming soon) and we are going to use them to surface best projects which developers like and not the one’s that we like or think are the best(for selfish reasons). We’ll be adding provision for discussions(comments) on projects which would help in discussions where creators can discuss with the community just like ProductHunt.

Above all this project is written in Angular (currently 4.0.0), and open source on Github. We are using firebase for hosting front-end and deployed fully on firebase itself. We’ll also be using Firebase cloud functions to handle business login very soon.

Community Help

We do these projects for fun, these projects happen in the free time that we have after we are done with our regular work angular consulting.

This is where we are seeking community help for AngularHunt.

There are many ways to contribute to this project. I am listing them with most important contribution at the top.

• Mobile responsiveness(currently it does not look good on mobile)
• Test cases
• Layout glitches and fixes
• Bug reporting

We’ll be more than happy to list your name/link in our README and give credits. It’s a nice opportunity for developers who want to experience how open source works or get more experience with this technology or just to connect with cool people and teams.

Looking forward to some cool community contributions and as always feedback.

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