What should we build?

[ProLoser]

https://plus.google.com/115485431256936261338/posts/C5DFPnHk9mk

A lot of us are becoming alarmed at the quality of posts, projects and resources popping up in the AngularJS community. The bottom line is the core team is too swamped to push 'Best Practices' or moderate anymore, and there is no officially documented best practices. It would be nice if there was a way to ensure / improve the quality of posts and projects that arise in the community through a centralized system.

Ideas that have been discussed:

• An official blog
• An official newsletter / internet magazine
• Pro reviewed-quality control
• A directory
• A voting and feedback system (StackOverflow-esque)
• A submission-for-review service
• Democratically run project (no 'you write for me' or 'i write for you' ownership)

Mix and match. We wouldn't want to discourage bloggers, and we know some of the best devs don't have the time to go to each blog and provide feedback (or blog themself).

CakePHP has the 'Bakery' service (although it lacks voting)

I personally have been actively working to provide a 'Best Practices' repository in the AngularJS wiki (instead of blogging) and the new book by @pkozlowski-opensource and @petebacondarwin is probably the closest thing we have now.

[maciejjankowski]

1. I think the best idea would be a combination of blog posts turned "lessons".
2. Blog has this great feature of "reminding" people there is a new content, while sites like John Lindquist vids offer a benefit of starting where you please.
3. It must be kept up to date, because Angular is evolving so fast many examples out there are outdated.
4. Voting is a great idea too, but I think it will push some of the material outside of reach.
   p.s. Democracy doesn't work - there a dictator needed.
5. I think it might be a good idea to set an Angular "Best practices" badge bloggers could use (they should opt in and have their code reviewed) this way they could be maintained because it would be the bloggers who'd want to participate, not you chasing them to write good code :)

[ProLoser]

@maciejjankowski keep in mind a few things:

1. Lots of blogs, tutorials and feeds already exist
   1. They are labeled as 'tips' or 'best practice' but contain many bad practices
   2. They are privately run
      1. This discourages others to join their project, so they start their own instead
      2. If the owners become busy, the resource becomes outdated
      3. There is no review process for their posts
2. AngularUI is entirely democratic. I serve more the role of coordinator. UI-Router is an excellent example of just such endeavor
3. StackOverflow and StackExchange are considered good resources and give voting to the community
4. Egghead could add an RSS if he wanted. It's also completely run by 1 person.
5. Solutions such as the G+ page, Brad's postings, twitter, and other crap is just a collection of 'whoever decides to spam this week' instead of a directory with best content pushed to the top
6. People may not want to be forced into writing on our platform as they may want to keep their own blogs/whatever

Honestly, there's something to be said about ngmodules.org (in fact @jimrhoskins was added to UI when we started discussing this same exact thing almost a year ago) but it's broken, in disuse, and only covers repos.

I'm thinking that it would be best to have a directory cover these primary items:

1. Blog Posts
2. Repos (projects)
3. Resources (all the rest?)

I was thinking it would be nice to have voting & pros/cons in bulleted format, so people can +1 a bullet. This way feedback is constructive (instead of comments like "it sucks") and authors can improve their work and have ratings adjusted accordingly. This was one idea anyway.

Example might be:

Resource: mean.io
Votes: +23 / -3
Pros:

• Covers full stack integration +4
• Boilerplates with good tools (ui-bootstrap)

Cons:

• Improper module structure
• Long introduction tutorial (use this resource instead)

Related:

• angular-seed
• angular-app
• ng-boilerplate

[0x-r4bbit]

Thanks @ProLoser for pushing this forward. One question: The example you showed above goes pretty much in a stackoverflow directino (which already has been discussed). For me, its still unclear where would be the resource itself? So there are votes, pros and cons and a "related" section (which is all very awesome). But what about the resource it itself? Is it still hosted "somewhere", so peeps are able to submit links to resources (kinda like Hacker News) or will they land in the directory?

[ProLoser]

I am not sure I follow your question. I figured that the site would be
built with firebase or something and hosted on gh pages and maybe get
linked to from the official website. I thought it would be cool to have an
official ng Internet magazine but a lot of people are already trying to do
that and may not like the idea, even if it is democratically run. Are you
like suggesting that we create some code snippet people place directly onto
their blog or repo (like those 3rd party commenting services)?

[ProLoser]

Or follow the bakery example and host the blog posts on this service. The
difference would be we would still show posts on other blogs but unlike all
other services anyone can post immediately, no "you must be illuminati"
crap. Better to encourage people to write or post and then provide feedback
and improve the post than to create more barriers of entry.

[0x-r4bbit]

@ProLoser Using firebase for that would be awesome 👍 So, no I was just wondering, how submitted resources would be handled at all. So for example, how to submit a resource? Who is able to submit a resource, only "Members" or everybody? How does a submission look like? Does somebody just submit a link to a blogpost in the internet, or will the posts land in the directory somehow?

In short: would that more look like a Hacker News for Angular resources, or will the resources hosted by this whatEverItWillBecome-Site?

[ProLoser]

I thought it would be cool if we had a mix. Posts made directly to the
service would get the benefit of having more gurus review and provide
feedback, but linking off site would be supported too.

The only membership requirement would be that you have a Github account,
but we would have moderators who are just people willing to spend the time
doing cleanup.

I have found that I prefer the ask for forgiveness than permission approach
in general.

[0x-r4bbit]

In addition, I like the idea of voting resources very much! Much better then comments, although I think there should be a way to comment on resources (maybe only for voters) to have a chance to clarify, why somebody voted down or up (which is probably already covered by pros/cons).

But who will be able to vote? Everybody? Wouldn't actually make sense, since everybody could vote good things down and bad things up. So it seems that it only makes sense if "members" are able to vote. Then there's the next question, how to become a member? And also, if everybody is able to become a member, voting could be open to everyone, where we have the same problems as before.

[0x-r4bbit]

@ProLoser A mix SGTM.

[Foxandxss]

First, thanks for that "tips" and bad practices sentences, sounds for me ¬¬.

I don't think that everyone can vote. People tends to vote up everything they see. Just look to any reddit page with an angular article associated, it always have 3-4 times more positive votes even if they are not that good.

Also I think that people can blog all they want to, if they are bad, they won't get any visit. I don't feel my knowledge getting worse reading bad things, I just keep the best ideas :P

[pearlchen]

So I'm not too sure what the best approach would be at this very moment but, off the cuff:

1. It should try to work alongside official Angular documentation.

I see the official documentation as a way to get deeper into one specific API, especially to just double-check what the signature of a method is (what parameters it accepts). I wish these pages would be more brief but with more concise and straight forward examples. Very in-and-out!

But for someone looking for more information or context, official documentation could then link out to tutorials from this project so people can see how it fits into a bigger picture.

2. The organization of tutorials/articles should be based on what people are continually asking questions about. (Maybe people can share their Google Analytics keywords so we can compile together what some of these real questions are.)

Examples:

• How do I make a directive?
• How does scope work in a directive?
• Why shouldn't I have DOM manipulation in my controllers?
• etc, etc.

Once we have a wide set of questions to work from, I think the best approach would be to find a good base to answer this question (whether it exists already in the official documentation or as a blog article) and then "wiki-fy" it. By wiki-fy, I mean that someone does a code/readability review on it and supplies edits. As time progresses, this article can be continually improved to reflect the latest APIs and include clearer examples.

Just some initial thoughts. I've got more ideas.

[ProLoser]

Pinging @angular-ui on this thread.

[ProLoser]

@Foxandxss it wasn't directed at you, there's a LOT of solutions that share that name. Also, I don't know if 'they just up vote everything' is accurate. But most importantly, I'm not saying people shouldn't blog, I'm saying their visitors won't know better. They will usually have no idea about the mistakes in their work, and rather than having people go around to every blog post out there, it would be nice if we had a centralized feedback solution.

This could theoretically become an innovative solution for more than just AngularJS if executed properly.

[ProLoser]

@pchen I am not sure that the resource being the originator of content is the biggest priority. There is an issue of time / energy people are willing to expend to produce such material, and the bottom line is they are either more interested in having their own blog with their info, or they should push back to the docs/wiki. What you are describing is what I've already tried doing on the AngularJS Wiki.

I do think it would be an interesting point to get direct linking between articles and documentation.

[ProLoser]

Would be nice to get feedback from the @angular team