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Sasha Blagojevic
Sasha Blagojevic

Posted on • Updated on • Originally published at sasablagojevic.com

 

Online NPM downloads calculator

Npm package manager

Hey guys, long time no read!

Besides being a T-shaped full stack developer at JSGuru (a fancy and made up term I identify with now), additionally I work as part of the sales team and I'm also one of the people that manages our open source efforts

All these responsibilities mean that I have quite a few meetings over the week and I need to produce numbers so we can track our analytics, and that includes the number of downloads of our open source projects.

To make my life a bit easier I made an AI bot that calculates all downloads for a given NPM package and given period... lol just jokin', it's not AI, it's just a few if statements and a function here and there. ;)

A really simple tool but it gets the job done.

Try it out, it might come useful to you as well. I have a few ideas for new features, I'll be adding them from time to time. :)

Top comments (4)

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peter profile image
Peter Kim Frank

Hey Sasa, I'm a big fan. Look forward to playing around more. A few quick thoughts:

  • Maybe have some of the additional options (Range v. Point // Time Period) default-selected. That will make it a little easier to try it out as a first-time user
  • The placeholder text is a little dark. I immediately just clicked "Go!" because I thought it was actually filled in for me. Making it lighter could help the user understand that it's just a placeholder.
  • Right now the graph is rendering a tiny bit weird because it's so wide. Setting a max-width on that div might help.
  • Can you add a "leaderboard" or just some suggested packages somewhere on the page? It might help people understand how to get going.

Great job!

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blackcat_dev profile image
Sasha Blagojevic • Edited

Wow thanks for suchy a lengthy response and your feedback!

There is a lot of place for improvement, I’m aware of it, I just quickly plastered it all together last night because I had a meeting due this morning and I was getting tired of manually adding up all those download figures lol. It’s work in progress!

I definitely agree with you on the placeholder and pre set default time. I’ll fix it up ASAP.

The chart was initially centered and a lot narrower, it looked a lot prettier too, but when you chose a long custom range all those dates got crammed together and it looked nasty, so I had to go with full width until I have time to properly style it.

If you inspect it you’ll actually see that I used inline CSS euuw, I just wanted to make it presentable in a timely manner xD

I’ll be adding RoR’s Turbolinks for a smoother experience and I had an idea of adding a notification system you could subscribe to, e.g. to get a mail when a cetain package hits a milestone that you chose, like monthly downloads :))

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seankilleen profile image
Sean Killeen

Hey! I've noticed that in this post you use "guys" as a reference to the entire community, which is not made up of only guys but a variety of community members.

I'm running an experiment and hope you'll participate. Would you consider changing "guys" to a more inclusive term? If you're open to that, please let me know when you've changed it and I'll delete this comment.

For more information and some alternate suggestions, see dev.to/seankilleen/a-quick-experim....

Thanks for considering!

This post blew up on DEV in 2020:

js visualized

🚀⚙️ JavaScript Visualized: the JavaScript Engine

As JavaScript devs, we usually don't have to deal with compilers ourselves. However, it's definitely good to know the basics of the JavaScript engine and see how it handles our human-friendly JS code, and turns it into something machines understand! 🥳

Happy coding!