

I open sourced my first big rails app and have some questions for HN - dsowers

I shipped my first big rails application a few months back. Nobody really used it so I decided to just open source the code. I had a couple questions for the HN community. I'm still new to the github world.<p>1. Is this kind of project useful to anybody in the open source community at all? It's a bigger app without great documentation and a narrow range of uses. I'm sure the code quality isn't superb either, so should I even be putting it out there?<p>2. It isn't really the kind of thing that you can install easily, like wordpress or a ruby gem. There are a lot of gem dependencies and someone else would probably struggle through a number of things to get a working installation. Should I not open source something like this unless I spent a ton of time writing installation instructions, and or cleaning up the whole thing first?<p>On a side note, I'd be grateful for any feedback on my code quality. I know there are some big issues, like the absence of any tests. (I just wanted to ship something in rails first, before learning TDD). But any other feedback would be much appreciated. I think my ruby abilities have gotten a bit better since this app, but I would still love to hear any advice. Thanks in advance!<p>Here is the github repo: https://github.com/damian-sowers/mycelial
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saiko-chriskun
wow I haven't started but I have a /very/ similar idea to this I've been
wanting to build :P

Anywho- 1\. YES you should be putting it out there. Seriously. Don't worry
about 'omg this might not be the most ingenius code ever'. You're already
ahead of the game by shipping something. Employers love living, breathing
projects. Put everything you do on github.

2\. If you want to clean things up, sure go ahead and do so, although I'm
pretty much gonna say the same thing as above in that it's not really doing
any harm in the meantime. Get around to it when you get around to it.

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dsowers
Thanks for the advice. Making something public which feels imperfect takes
some getting used to. I guess nothing will ever truly feel complete, though.

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dsowers
live link to the repo: <https://github.com/damian-sowers/mycelial>

