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jfornear | 3 years ago
I built a free Django and React starter repo for https://learndjangoreact.com, and can share some feedback from that perspective:
1) I’m hesitant to post it because I don’t want to create a new account or connect my GitHub to promote a free repo.
2) I think Google is good enough for anyone looking for a Django and React starter app, especially since I already have a site for it. GitHub search is pretty good too.
3) I built my starter app mostly for myself to build new ideas faster, and I already moved on to a new idea (https://mailgrid.app) — so any effort spent on this feels like energy taken from that, etc.
4) I think new developers should pick whatever stack that inspires them, and I don’t expect my starter app to appeal to a wide audience.
Hope that helps!
ecuaflo|3 years ago
1) That is a reasonable point. We request the most granular features we can to make our app work. For OAuth, just the minimum profile info. For connecting repos, you can give access to just the repo you want to list, and we access repository hooks so we can update our listing when you update the repo. I listed some public repos that I'll have to manually update, so maybe I can allow others to do the same and just have a cron that does it. We also ask for administration permissions so we can add buyers to private repos. Unfortunately GitHub doesn't seem to allow more dynamic permissions to only apply to private repos and not public ones.
2) Valid. Maybe this is more suited for the premium case where you'd like to find starters where the creator has a paid incentive to keep updating and addressing issues.
3) If you charged for it and got people buying, maybe you would feel differently?
4) I agree developers should pick the group of tools they are interested in, but they still have to piece them together, which can be more work than the project itself in the worst-case scenario. If someone wanted to work with Django and React, I think being handed a starter with some instructions would get them running faster than having to understand at the core how they can work together and actually getting that functional.
Your own example reminds me of one feature I'd like to add is a "built with" section for each starter that would show live projects that started with it.
Anyways thanks for the feedback! Really valuable for me.
ecuaflo|3 years ago