The Hacker Recipes

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Welcome to THR v2! ​

The Hacker Recipes was created in 2020, using GitBook. It was great at the beginning, and allowed this Free & Open-Source projet to exist. GitBook kindly provided us with a free "Community" plan, and we're grateful for that.

The GitBook saga 😩 ​

Sadly, GitBook changed a lot. Relying on it has been very painful for about 2 years now...

  • resolving conflicts was horrible
  • buggy editor at times, weird and complexe UX overall (lots of settings everywhere for accounts, orgs, sites, spaces)
  • poor assets management (e.g. all in the same directory)
  • introduced a lot of deadlinks by constantly changing the "slug" (read more)
  • inability to show the contributors of a page publicly (read more)
  • inability to build the website locally, preventing some contexts to use The Hacker Recipes offline (read more)
  • inability to integrate Google Ads (or similar), which is needed for this project to thrive (actually, this was made possible around mid-2024, far too late, through one ads provider only).

Relying on GitBook has become increasingly uncomfortable. We also realized that some GitBook features, which initially seemed beneficial, were actually locking us in (e.g., the discontinued gitbook-cli, lack of control over slugs and redirection settings, new custom blocks, native markdown blocks modified and becoming incompatible with other md renderers).

Last but not least, given GitBook's expensiveness, we were concerned that losing the "Community" plan for any reason would be risky, as we wouldn't be able to afford the paid plans and would have no viable alternatives.

Version 2.0 🚀 ​

In July 2023, we made the decision to leave GitBook. We spent one year searching for alternatives, developing our own solution, going back and forth a lot, while putting new contributions and articles on hold...

We are now proud (and relieved) to present The Hacker Recipes v2 🎉

  • Contributors are now highlighted
  • Faster loading times on big articles
  • Ability to access The Hacker Recipes offline (work in progress)
Note for past contributors

A lot of changes made through GitBook don't show properly in the git log, effectively preventing us from pulling all contributors. GitBook doesn't allow us to export it. If you're a past contributor, we need you to create a Pull Request adding minor changes (e.g. a comment, or space) to the pages that you have contributed to. We will make sure that you were, indeed, a contributor to that page, and will merge the PR, which should then show you as "contributor" on THR on the next build.

Knowledge is power

The Hacker Recipes is free for all, and we intend to keep it that way as long as possible (until the end of times would be nice 👌). In order to do so, it will rely on Ads and Sponsoring, allowing us to keep this project not only free but also evolving.

We want authors to be rewarded

We will need a few months to put that in place. Now that THR v2 is out, we need to work on the legal and financial aspects to find out how we can actually reward contributors (past and future). We also intend on funding Open-Source projects.

If you feel like something's not working as it should, please open an issue or reach out.