The Difficulties of Creating a Community Around an Open Source Project
What I went through during my first year as creator of an open source project.
Have you ever wanted to contribute to an open source project but didn’t know where to start? Create your own!
I got interested in open source not long ago when I became a data engineer. Using Apache’s tools every day made me curious to see the inner workings of them, and how much I could improve them.
The problem is that I got really confused trying understand those big projects since I’m a junior developer, and that’s when I decided to create my very own open source project. That’s how unexpected-isaves was born.
Creating this pip package was a great decision because it gave me a lot of knowledge that just coding tiny scripts was not giving me.
I was able to finally understand project management having to think about stuff from semantic versioning to backwards compatibility.
I’ve been learning a lot and this is awesome. But I would love to see this package thrive, and that’s not happening.
I understand that it is not a particularly useful package, but I do feel that people often overlook artistic software. I see potential for some niche applications, for example: it could be used in a Telegram bot that takes an image an returns a message long ascii art copy pasta. How cool would that be?
It’s a tool made from a creator to other creators. As the project’s readme states:
A quick scroll through social media and you’ll find very talented people making portraits out of dice, rubik’s cube, in minecraft as pixel art, or even using MIDI notes on a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). This package gives you the ability to do the same, with or without talent.
About marketing it I’m also not obtaining success. I’ve been getting some traffic from spamming the link on different subreddits, but nothing significant.
Even a bit frustrated, I’m still keeping the project under active development because I learn from it every day, and I believe that’s the moral of this story.
Create something you like, and something that makes you grow as a developer. You’ll end up attracting interested people naturally!
