Explore the Product Hunt Maker Network
Originally built for the Product Hunt Makers Festival, Maker Network will become center for all my projects related to the maker community.
After a weeks worth of voting, and some fingernail biting, yesterday ProductHunt announced the winners of the Makers Festival.
There was only two entries in the data visualization category so I was pretty confident of placing 馃榾 but it turned out that Maker Network won its category!
You can see the winners and runners up from each of the 7 categories here:
https://www.producthunt.com/newsletter/2939
I ran into a few problems using the new API, but the Product Hunt team has been very helpful and responsive to fixing issues I found.
I was able to build pretty much what I wanted.
You start with your (or anyone else's) profile, and see all the people you've made a product featured on Product Hunt with. From there you can explore the network of each of those makers, and their network and their network, and so on.
I also added a network graph, a visualization of a makers network 3 levels deep, which produced some very interesting graphics, especially for active makers. For example:
https://makernetwork.app/users/rrhoover/graph
Overall very happy with how everything turned out.
I'm a big fan of hackathons, and signed up for the Product Hunt Makers Festival instinctually.
I didn't think I was actually going to have time to build an application to submit, but I ended up getting some time off the day job and started brainstorming ideas.
I've always had a fascination with data visualization and the network I've built up over the years because of my activities on Product Hunt has been very helpful to me.
I decided an application that explores the networks of product hunt makers would be a great submission.
I needed to explore the new Product Hunt GraphQL API and see what exactly I could get data wise and how I could use that information to build and display maker networks.
Originally built for the Product Hunt Makers Festival, Maker Network will become center for all my projects related to the maker community.