
Ask HN: How does one start and scale an open source project? - hsikka
I&#x27;m a graduate neuroscience student, and while teaching myself JavaScript I&#x27;m starting to create a library for computational biology simulation. I have no doubt that building it on web technology can be useful to someone, and can benefit from other&#x27;s input, but I&#x27;m very new to open sourcing? Any tips, guidance, or readings you can direct me to?
======
Hamatti
I'm sure other people will be able to give better tips for doing the open
sourcing and scaling up, so I'm not gonna touch that. I'll start with a
different approach. I think the first important part is to forget the "scale
an open source project" and just focus on "start".

Build a software that solves a problem you have. Preferably a single problem.
Then make it good. Give it out to people you know in the same field or post it
to relevant forums online.

After that, "open source" it. (You can put the code publicly on Github from
the beginning but here I mean start promoting it to get users and
collaborators.)

The motivation behind this sentiment is that all the extra stuff around this
(maintaining the community of collaborators, replying to bug tickets, checking
out pull requests) takes a lot of time that you should use in building the
library first.

------
confiscate
Hey, what kind of neuroscience functionality is it? Because I am curious about
what you said about having no doubt it will be useful to someone. Thanks

------
sjroot
Step 1. Post about it on HN Step 2. Include a link to your source code
(through GitHub or something similar)

That seems to do the trick! I would also advise sharing it with your research
colleagues, and those at other institutions. Consult them for feedback
particularly because they have domain-specific knowledge.

------
cottonseed
[https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2015/07/10/the-myths-of-
bi...](https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2015/07/10/the-myths-of-
bioinformatics-software/)

~~~
hsikka
thanks for the link. really useful insight

