In this article, I will tell you the whole story and share all the secrets of this operation. I will also answer use this article to clarify a few points as answer to aggressive comments I received on this.

Right now, I am working on a very cool project named Sqreen. I actually develop the Node.js agent. Sqreen is a tool that blocks attacks within your application with a minimum of action from the developer.

Hey, what’s the link with HN ?

Right now, the Sqreen Node.js agent is in public beta phase. Even though we have a lot of Beta users, I want to test it as much as possible. One solution was to look for Node.js Open Source applications. I tried the most well known (Ghost, Cozy, …). But I had a hard time finding test targets. I went through Quora, Reddit, Google,… and did not find much.

We first tried a “Ask HN”, it was a failure. So I started digging as much as possible withing Github to find projects to test Sqreen on. I found some and listed them in a text file.

With the results, I spent 30 minutes bootstrapping the list and asked for a review by my awesome coworkers. And on Monday morning (in Paris), I made the repository public.

You have to know that I am not a HN user at all. I do not really know anything about this website. I was advised to publish a “Show HN”, so I did.

Before lunch, my link was on the first page and even reached the first position.

My feelings at this point: Source on Tumblr

As a result, the repo quickly got a lot of Github stars and was featured in Github most Trendings projects.

Now, I don’t really need to search for projects to test Sqreen with. Awesome folks are opening PRs with cool stuff for me to look at (you would be happy to learn that, so far, Sqreen is working like a charm with all web applicaitons on the list).