This is my first post here on dev.to, and I am here to talk about one of my recent achievements – I’ve got 100+ stars in one of my open-source projects. Not only that, I’ve got 4000+ views and 2400+ unique views on my github repo, and all these happened within 24 hours.
My project, goralim, is a simple lightweight Golang package for rate-limiting API calls. I tried to have little to no external dependencies, so anyone can extend it with their choice of go packages and use it.
I usually get stars on my GitHub repo from 2-3 friends of mine who follow me on GitHub. but that’s it. But a few days back, I was kinda stress-eating and coding at night. Before I went to bed, I thought of posting the project on hackernews, thought no one would care to comment or star it, and why should they because the code is not production-ready. It’s just a GitHub repo with only 2 stars and no proper documentation.
When I woke up I already had 70+ stars and 20+ comments on my post. People are giving me feedback to improve it and make it better. Some people asked for some reasonable features to add (which I’m working on). and I realized the only person who thinks my projects are stupid is me. It stayed on the top 10 of the homepage of the hackernews for almost 20 hours.
I’m one of those people who builds hobby projects and do not broadcast about it. I never broadcast about it because oftentimes I build stuff for my personal use and/or am not sure about my code quality ( I don’t even write test cases if the number of lines of code is under 200). But I did that with almost no expectations and got overwhelming responses – most importantly people told me who they wanted – feature requests. I was almost moving on from the project to work on my other python open-source project ( which I will release pretty soon) but now I guess I’ve to work on this project as well. I love this.
So if you’re someone like me thinking no one will notice your project, just release it and talk about it – you never know what might happen. You’ve got nothing to lose.
If you’re someone who loves to contribute to open-source projects, you’re more than welcome to contribute to my project
goralim. If this story of mine gave you a little bit of motivation to work on that stupid idea you’ve had, go work on it. Build it for yourself. And I would appreciate some stars too on my project.
