Ask HN: High Quality FOSS Apps?

by jfaucett on 6/27/2015, 4:53 PM with 2 comments

I've started a project on github, which is a curated list of high quality production grade free and open source software applications for web, mobile, desktop, and games.

Mainly because as a developer I often find myself looking for large non-trivial examples of software in the wild that I can learn from. Also, like most devs, I strive to build software that is exemplary both in its code and end-product so apps that can show me how this is done are a goldmine. They have things that library examples can't really show you, like setting up integration tests, code organization and modularity, etc.

Anyways, I know there are many HNers on here who build quality open source apps, so I wanted to ask if any of you have any suggestions? Since the list is currently based entirely off of my experience its very small and I'd love to get your input.

  • by phantom_oracle on 6/28/2015, 5:37 AM

    You want to give this project life while learning something and not depending on user-driven content?

    Leverage existing software-ranking sites that have stars/reviews, try to scrape them (or use an API if they offer it), quantify that data and put it into a nice webpage.

    You will learn:

    - APIs/Scraping - Data Analysis - Some HTML/CSS/JS

    It'll be better than starting a project like this, where you "wait for them to come".

  • by jfaucett on 6/27/2015, 5:45 PM

    as an example my current list contains:

    1. Webapps (frontends only): circleci, the-guardian

    2. Webapps: ghost, gitlab, discourse, reddit, taiga

    3. Desktop: blender, atom

    4. Mobile: -nothing-

    5. Games: O A.D, Hedgewars

    And here's the link to the details: https://github.com/jwaterfaucett/awesome-foss-apps/blob/mast...