
Discover dev – a daily digest of engineering blogs - deepakkarki
https://discoverdev.io
======
deepakkarki
For those curious, DiscoverDev is a fully static site hosted on Netlify. It's
all handcrafted vanilla HTML and CSS. (The first site I've ever developed,
zero design experience, so nothing fancy). Zero lines of Javascript as well :)

1\. I've written my own crawler+parser which parses selected blogs and
publications and then displays new articles to me in a chronological manner in
a GUI.

2\. I select the articles myself, and tag them.

3\. Then a script sees all the selected articles and generates a JSON file.

4\. I've written my own static site generator which consumes this JSON and
spits out the updated website and RSS.

5\. I push the changes to my git repo.

6\. Netlify listens to the git repo and updates my build.

7\. People see my updated webpage and RSS feed within seconds.

Thanks for taking a look.

\-----

Subscribe to the newsletter if you're looking forward to receive a weekly
digest of interesting articles and resources. You can unsubscribe anytime, I
keep my content to the point.

~~~
TeMPOraL
And as a result, the site is fast as if made of magic. Thank you for doing it
right.

> _The first site I 've ever developed, zero design experience, so nothing
> fancy_

Design is good too. It is utilitarian, just at it should be. I'm increasingly
convinced that getting "design experience" at some point starts to cause
_problems_. At least if one's getting that experience without getting some
extra "common sense" and "be nice to other people" experience.

~~~
elcapitan
One proposal regarding utilitarian design: As this already uses old school
blue links, it would be nice to also have visited links in purple. Like in the
olden days :) Makes a collection of links much more useful.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Isn't that the kind of thing that that simply requires _not to actively break
it_? I.e. dropping some CSS should restore that behaviour.

(Assuming it still works. I can't remember when was the last time I saw a site
not redefining link styles completely.)

------
deepakkarki
I curate every weekday, 8-10 high quality links. Been doing this for about an
year! Feel free to ask me any questions.

Mailing list :
[https://www.discoverdev.io/subscribe](https://www.discoverdev.io/subscribe)

RSS feed :
[https://www.discoverdev.io/rss.xml](https://www.discoverdev.io/rss.xml)

~~~
feydaykyn
Hi,

Thanks for your ongoing work! Would it be possible for you to create a
duplicate rss feed where the articles are the root and not hidden in the
description ? It would help keeping up with the pace by speeding up the
scanning process (I only check for my feeds once a week or so, I have tons of
links to go through). I realize this would hide the 'daily' aspect of your
effort, and I would totally understand if you declined. Thanks again!

~~~
deepakkarki
Oh hey! I used to do this before but a lot of people started complaining that
they then had duplicate items in their RSS feed, like the one from the website
and one from me as well.

Plus it will be hard to figure out which ones are coming from DiscoverDev, no?

~~~
feydaykyn
In Feedly the source feed is always displayed, I thought it was the same in
others feed readers as it seems a basic info.

I understand the duplicate issue for those following both DiscoverDev and the
discrete websites, I wouldn't mind as it is intentional but that's just me.

I'll make the extra clicks !

Thanks again

(edit: spelling)

------
osamagirl69
I love the idea, I have longed for a no-nonsense aggregater of
blogs/websites/etc without the bloat.

Is there any chance you could add more hardware orientated stuff? Even if all
it did was scrape hackaday.com and remove the spam and 'editors' drivel.

~~~
deepakkarki
Oh would I love to do hardware (as I got into software through hardware
itself)! But I feel the project will become too broad, and wouldn't be for any
one group.

I do include a bunch of hardware/maker resources in the newsletter though!

------
campallison
"Handpicked by AI..."

I hope that joke was intentional.

~~~
deepakkarki
;)

Well, I wanted to automate it, but the "AI" just so easily got fooled, though
if anyone is interesting in working on it with me I'd be happy. Now that I've
been running it for an year, I have some unique insights that would be
helpful.

~~~
nigealj
If you are planning to eventually automate this with some sort of
recommendation engine, then I hope you're at least capturing all the data and
analytics currently to help drive that in the future!

------
aw3c2
Nice! It would be great if posts had timestamps, eg on
[https://www.discoverdev.io/tags/jvm](https://www.discoverdev.io/tags/jvm)

~~~
deepakkarki
Hmm.. I didn't realise it wasn't there, sorry about that, will add it by
Monday :)

------
andrewstellman
This looks valuable. Good job with the tags. Even better if there was a way to
do a full-text search of all articles from the front page.

------
lucidone
A small, subjective point of improvement: #fff and #000 are very high
contrast, I find pages with a slight muting of these two colors (ie, #fcfcfc
and #030303 - an offset of 3 in rgb) to be much easier to read. Regardless, I
love the site. I've bookmarked it and will visit alongside my morning routine.

------
dchuk
I maintain a similar site here, but it’s all hands off, RSS feeds + hn style
voting interface: [https://engineered.at](https://engineered.at) problem is no
one votes so it’s basically chronological.

The curation quality of your site is fantastic! Keep it up!

------
Matt3o12_
Wow, the design is amazing -- I am really not good with design but it is very
simple and extremely very clean. I might steal it at some point. I also really
like the no javascript approach. You even have a RSS reader, which is really
helpful but I have one little nickpick, the date format is: "Fri, 11 May 2018
00:00:00" which is slightly wrong (you forgot +0000 as the time zone). Good
job anyways!

------
dragonshed
There is a lot to like here, but I wish viewing by tags had a more obvious
sort applied.

Some items included aren't of interest to me, so naturally I'd like some way
to filter those out. Viewing a tag is a good way to do that, but then I lose
the chronological organization.

~~~
pbourke
Not sure about this, but the items on tag pages appear to be in reverse
chronological order. It might help if there was a date displayed beside each
item.

------
antonio-ramadas
First, great work! I’ve subscribed the RSS feed :) This is something I started
wishing for!

Second, on the RSS feed, could you display the source of each link as you do
on the website?

------
jnpatel
Would you all like it if the links on the front page of HN were more like
those on Discover dev, or happy with the way it is?

~~~
deepakkarki
I like HN for what it is, I get to learn form a variety of topics I wouldn't
have encountered otherwise. Discover dev was made to solve another pain point
- I prefer tech only news, like a bunch of in depth articles without any
commentary.

The idea was that engineering teams all over the world produce some really
great content on their blogs, but find it hard to get any traction given all
the SEO optimised blog spam, so I wanted to create a resource that would
promote the good articles to those who seek it. Later I also expanded to
include a couple of tech publications like Hackernoon, code mentor, etc (but
you'd be surprised at the number of blog spam and blockchain articles that get
produced there - I filter out all but the interesting / in-depth ones).

------
badrabbit
Nice work. Your site does not render well on my mobile browser for some
reason.

I would subscribe to a newsletter or feed of this.

~~~
deepakkarki
Scroll down, there is both a newsletter and a RSS feed!

~~~
badrabbit
Thanks.

------
gozrik
The design is great, I love it. And the site itself is something I’ve wanted
for a long time.

------
nzjrs
Seems to be only software engineering. Maybe the mods can update the
submission title?

------
chime
This is fantastic! Added to my daily read-list. Already enjoyed two articles
I'd have never come across. Thanks for your efforts.

