

Ask HN: How do I get people interested in my open source project? - marshallford

I have been working solo on a fairly niche open source project. I would love to get some sort of community started around the project, or at least a couple of people complaining via GitHub issues. Any ideas on getting at least a little interest? I would love a second set of eyes.<p>Thanks.<p>EDIT: As requested, the link.<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;marshallford&#x2F;www-start
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nostrademons
The rules for building a successful open-source project are pretty similar to
those for building a successful startup: make something people want.

Glancing at the project description, the biggest problem I see is that pretty
much the only value provided is "my own opinions". I have my own opinions; I
don't need yours. I don't even use the widely-used boilerplate packages like
Twitter Bootstrap because invariably they do something contrary to the needs
of my site, and then ripping them out is more effort than not using them to
begin with.

I've got a couple moderately-successful open-source projects with Write
Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours [1] and Gumbo HTML5 Parser [2], and what they
have in common is that they solve a problem that people have that they're too
lazy to fix themselves, in a way that takes less effort than diving into the
problem would. In Write Yourself a Scheme, that problem is "I want to learn
Haskell", and the lazyness is "but I don't want to have to butt my head
against these annoying monad things, and specific API calls, and undocumented
type-system corners. I want all that explained to me." For Gumbo, the problem
is "I want to parse HTML", and the lazyness is "but I don't want to spend my
time implementing the 400+ clauses of the spec".

If you think in terms of "What can I do for other people that they don't want
to do for themselves?", you will end up with many more users. Projects that do
all the fun stuff but none of the hard stuff end up fun, but useless. Projects
that do all the hard stuff and leave the fun stuff to other people get used.

[1]
[http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_H...](http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_Hours)

[2] [https://github.com/google/gumbo-parser](https://github.com/google/gumbo-
parser)

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BorisMelnik
Find ways for low/mid level developers to see that this will help to advance
their career. I've been a part of 1 open source project, and that was normally
the question I would see before a developer would decide to chip in. They want
to see that _you_ the founder/CEO are invested and won't decide to drop off
the project from a funding or marketing perspective. (a lot of) developers
want to see their name on the top of the contrib. list at the end of the day
when it is successful.

one very small example / aspect that I can contribute.

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marshallford
Clickable: [https://github.com/marshallford/www-
start](https://github.com/marshallford/www-start)

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aaronbrethorst
You might start by including a link to it in the text above.

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yoloswagins
www-start looks like a good quick start to building a HTML5 app.

In the README, you should talk about how it helps you get going faster.

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marshallford
thanks, I am in the process of writing documentation right now.

