This week we began adding loads of content from Github related to developer blogs, profiles, and landing pages. In total, we pulled in roughly 160 open-source repositories from which 130 deployed successfully on our end with little to no input from our team.

In going through this process, we got a pretty good feel for what to expect from open-source repos built by a variety of users and businesses for differing use-cases. And, I thought this might be a good opportunity to discuss our process, review our findings, and then share a few of our favorite finds below.

To start, we decided to focus our search on a couple of major Javascript frameworks and then explore a couple of strategies for finding the best content on Github. The frameworks we chose were Astro and NextJS and then, rather than searching from Google, we did the following:

• Pulled from the Astro marketplace
• Pulled from the NextJS marketplace
• Pulled examples from the Astro Github Repo
• Pulled examples from the Nextjs Github Repo
• Queried Github via Github Search
• And then, pulled templates from specific authors we encountered along the way

Before diving in, we explicitly decided we were looking for software templates (mainly front-end or fullstack) that were designed for blogging, profiles, or landing pages.

As developers, we've spent plenty of time navigating Github. However, most of that time was either project or task-based where we needed answers for a specific feature or product. This was different.

In general, we found the marketplace templates (pulled from Astro and Nextjs) were the highest quality and most likely to deploy to production. And this makes sense because someone (either the framework authors or a third-party) had spent the time to write the code, deploy it, and then publish it to the marketplace with some marketing speak fairly recently. This didn't surprise us but it felt like we were regurgitating what is already out there.

Next, we explored the examples available from the framework authors and, as you might expect, we enjoyed pretty good success here. (It's worth noting that we went well beyond Astro and Nextjs in this department.) The trouble that we ran into in this space were two-fold:

1. Many examples were built to showcase specific features not finished products.
2. Many examples utilized custom configurations specific to that project (ie Expressjs)

Next, we used the Github search engine for a more open-ended exploration process which we found to be both fun and tiresome with mixed results.

On the one hand, it was great to see so many open-source repositories where developers had spent time building templates. And you could see the changing market trends from even two years ago to today.

On the other hand, I quickly realized that while there some good nuggets in there and rabbit holes to explore, it truly was the wild west. Meaning, you could spend hours dialing in the topic, search query, recency, programming language, and number of stars -- only to retrieve a mixed bag of results. There is no quality control in open source. And, many authors get away with custom setups and / or a small bug (like a type error during the build) that prevent the application from deploying to production despite plenty of validation.

The final step we took was earmarking the notable authors we found along this journey, that had more repositories to offer, and then conducting a deep dive into their profile(s). In general, this step felt like the most fun because we were truly going down the rabbit hole and then hanging out for awhile. But, as you might expect, this too yielded mixed results where a couple of repositories were polished and then the rest were either outdated or unsupported.

Overall, we had a ton of fun with this journey and plenty of great discoveries to show for it. We also refined and improved our methodology as we went along which yielded better results. As promised, here are a few of our favorites deployed to Playbooks:

1. NextJS CV - Demo
2. NextJS SAAS Starter Kit - Demo
3. React Gatsby Portfolio - Demo
4. Leerob Portfolio Template - Demo
5. OnceUI Starter - Demo
6. Astro Backroom - Demo
7. Astro Dante - Demo
8. Astro Developer Portfolio - Demo
9. Astro Epic Studio Theme - Demo
10. Astro Nano Theme - Demo

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