Jerod Santo changelog.com/posts

Recent improvements to Changelog Nightly

Since its launch over a year ago (backstory), thousands of developers have enjoyed receiving the day's hottest repos in their inbox each night.

While Nightly provides a ton of value, there are ways (big and small) that it can be improved. Over the past few weeks, we've made a few of those improvements. Namely:

  1. We now list Top Starred repos first. — I struggled with this idea at first, since Nightly is the only place you can get the Top New repos of the day. However, time and time again I found myself scrolling past the Top New list to get to the Top Starred list. I asked Adam and a few other people, and they all agreed that the order should be swapped.
  2. We raised the star threshold for Top New. — previously, you had to receive 5 or more stars during the first 24 hours of your repo being public to make the list. This was a little too easy, as many folks can scratch together a few friends or a tweet to their followers to achieve this, lowering the quality of the projects making the list. We increased it to 8 (for now) and I believe it's improved the signal-to-noise ratio quite a bit.
  3. We retired FreeCodeCamp to the hall of fame. — props to Quincy and the gang for consistenly receiving hundreds of stars each day, but it's time to shine the spotlight on other notable repositories we need to hear about.
  4. We now exclude all repos that don't have a description. — when judging low-value (or hack) repos that were making the lists, many of them had no description whatsoever. So, we now ignore these. If you want your new project to make Nightly, give it a good description!

We have other ideas on making Nightly even better, but we're only a few of its readers. We'd love to hear from you as well. How can we make Changelog Nightly even better?


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