Closed xi closed 6 years ago
Hello there, and thank you for asking!
I’ve initiated my fair share of open source projects. Some got popular, but most didn’t. And I’m okay with that. At the core of every project I started was the desire from me to learn or try something. If it eventually helped someone, that’s even better, but that’s not the end goal.
Now if you really want your project to get known, there are things you can do to help. Stephanie Hurlburt explains all this in a great Twitter thread, so I’m just going to paraphrase.
When I look back at my most successful projects:
Indeed, at some point you will have to make it easy for people to contribute to your project. This has several benefits, from engaging the community, to making more likely your project will survive you inevitably stepping-away. That’s something I failed to do on SassDoc for instance. SassDoc has always been built by the SassDoc core team (4 people), and when we all had our life calling back, the project froze. It still works very nicely, but it doesn’t grow anymore.
This might be worth asking this question to @sindresorhus given the massive amount of open-source projects he maintains, as well as @TheLarkInn for his great community work on Webpack.
PS: I’ll tweet about your project. I’s great work you have there. I’ll share it. ;)
Thanks for the quick reply! Really hepful!
I have done quite some side-projects. The one I am probably most proud of is https://github.com/xi/sass-planifolia. Not because it was complicated to write, but because I improved it over time until it was both powerfull and lightweight (but of course still not perfect).
The trouble is, I am probably the only person in the world who uses it. I send the link to some relevant mailing lists but did not get much response. I also do not have thousands of twitter followers. What would you do to get people to use (and give feedback on) a project like this?