We are very grateful to have received an honorable mention in the 6th SBC challenge and have since been hard at work trying to improve on and build new features for http://www.stellarup.com.
After some careful consideration, we ended up pivoting from out initial gameplan so that we could develop a new feature that we believe would be the most beneficial to the community at this time. We would have loved to have this out earlier but hopefully it will continue to bring value to developers and users in the future.
While reading through the details of the 7th SBC, contributions to open source projects were a main focus. We wanted to help make our contribution to the open source effort by expanding on the current list to show all of the open source Stellar projects that developers could contribute to. Further enabling Stellar developers to easily locate tools built by the community to assist in their development. This will also help assist users searching for projects developed for Stellar with a variety of different categories and tags to filter by.
What we have been spending our time on since the last build challenge:
1. Addressing Technical Debt
Something that always seems to lose priority when new features are on the horizon we wanted to make sure that was not the case for us. We wanted to make sure that we were working with the best tools in the most efficient way possible so that we had a solid foundation for continued growth.
2. Improving infrastructure
We have expanded on our tech stack to allow us to build more powerful features. We wanted to lay the groundwork now so that we can have the ability to seamlessly grow and scale in the future.
3. Community Section
The community section is something that wasn't planned for but we felt that it could bring some of the greatest benefits. The database of applications will continue to grow and become more refined over time but we wanted to get this out as soon as possible so that we could get some community feedback. One of the powerful features of this section is the tags associated with each project. Users can now easily use the advanced search and select the 'Open Source' tag to view all of the open source projects for Stellar. Or what SBC the project first entered into the Stellar ecosystem. Or what dev tools have been created to help in the development of your Stellar application. We have tried to be as accurate as possible but we understand that at the beginning there may be projects labeled incorrectly and we appreciate any feedback to help improve the accuracy of this list.
4. Developers Section
The developers section is something in the very earlier stages of its growth as well. We wanted to give developers the option to toggle on and off certain settings to help in their development. We felt it was better to separate some of these options from the rest of the application since they would bring more value to the developer rather then the normal user. We are also interacting with the Github API to access the repositories on Stellar. We are looking to improve this feature as well to give developers a better snapshot of the current state of the projects on Stellar.
So although we took a bit of a detour from our initial roadmap we are now back on track with a new feature that we believe can really benefit the community. The first step was to get all of the information out there for people to access. The next step that we are looking to take is to create easier ways for users to consume the data. Better ways to summarize the day to day operations, transactions etc. of the Horizon Network. As well as the continued growth of tools that Stellar users can benefit from in their day to day routine.
Questions for the Community
To create a better user experience we would love to hear any and all feedback that you may have.
- We have categorized the community applications into 8 general categories. Do you see a need to expand and add more categories?
- Right now we have set it up so that each project falls into one category in a very similar fashion to any other app store. Should we continue with this approach or can a project possibly fall into multiple categories?
- We have tags for License, Platform, SBC, and Category. Do you know of any other tags that could be useful for filtering projects?
We appreciate any and all feedback and look forward to hearing from you.
Website: http://www.stellarup.com/
