Announcing elixirstatus
TL;DR I think we need a site where people can post what they made in Elixir, simliar to RubyFlow for Ruby. A service that is build in Elixir, that is Open Source and integrates nicely with the existing ecosystem. I want to build this.
Open letter version:
Hello folks,
some of you may know me because I maintain inch-ci.org and was fortunate enough to be featured on Elixir Radar twice (Issues #10 and #11). Today I want to propose an addition to the Elixir community: a community-driven site to post your new projects, blog posts and version updates.
But wait, you will say, we already have something like this, blog aggregators and twitter accounts retweeting interesting stuff - the community is fine. Well, it is, but I think we are still missing a piece of the puzzle.
I am thinking of a service to post stuff you made or improved or wrote. Ruby has RubyFlow for this and I know that I owe many of my early adopters to that venue (incidentally, it was because of José that I decided to put my stuff on RubyFlow, but that is another story).
To give you an idea what this could look like, here is a rough draft: [edit: update]
This should be for the little coder who wrote his or her first package or blog post. It should be a public utility, think of it as infrastructure. A service that is build in Elixir, that is Open Source and integrates nicely with the existing ecosystem. Individual coders can go there to discover interesting stuff others made as can curators of podcasts and newsletters and bloggers. And people who released a version update or wrote a blog post can share their news without the announcement being drowned by all the Twitter noise (seriously, there is just too much to follow on there).
This does not take away anything from existing trends like the #elixirlang and #myelixirstatus hashtags, Elixir Radar or existing, curated newsletters and blogs, but it builds upon existing trends to add a new venue to the brimming Elixir community:
- This is about broadcasting, but not so much about dialog.
- This is about empowering individuals, but not about aggregation.
- This is about easier on-boarding of new Elixir enthusiasts who are eager to share, but not so much about coders who are already known.
- This is about the coder/blogger who wants to shout “look what I’ve done”.
This project will rise and fall with the participation of the community, I am well aware of that. And as the maintainer of Inch I am also aware how hard it can be to convince people to try something with a different approach.
But I am optimistic for this one.
Best,
René
