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How do you find your software and tools?

Article lobste.rs

How do you find your software and tools?

Crustaceans,

When you are looking for a piece of software or a tool for your needs, what is your technique? I find it very hard to discover hobbyist projects.

Let me develop, a month ago I was looking for an append-only key-value store. I remember it having some kind of flower name "Kamelia" or something like this. It took me a lot of duckduckgoing/googling and searching on github: "append only store", "key value store no deletion". After multiple days of giving up and trying searching again, I found it "Parkeep (née Camlistore)". Since the name changed and it doesn't mention anywhere it is append-only, I dismissed it two or three times during my tries.

Another day, I was looking at alternative for gcc and clang. I clicked around github, sourcehut and gitlab READMEs to find scc, chibicc, cproc or lacc. Most of them look like high quality hobbyist projects, which are my favorite kind of projects.

Sometimes I find insanely high quality hobbyist projects hidden in comments on Lobste.rs, the orange website or Reddit.

When looking for these types of high quality hobbyist projects, github is not always the solution. Some are hosted on sourcehut, gitlab or codeberg. But sometimes, you can also find some isolated gitlab or gitea instances. It is very hard to search these platforms.

For this usecases, Duckduckgo and Google are literally useless. I'm looking for an alternative to Ansible right now, the results are filled with Search-Engine-Optimized articles that list the same thing "Puppet", "CFEngine", "Chef". I'm not looking for this, I'm looking for some person in their garage who decided: "I think all of this sucks, I will do my own!", kinda like ziglang started.

Do you have a secret technique or website of which I'm not aware? Or does it suck as well for you, and you just spend hours clicking around and bookmarking websites?

I start really wondering how these Lobste.rs/Reddit comments find these projects...

Discussion 38 comments · 39 points · acatton · 2021-01-18
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