Move your projects out of the basement

Lets start off with keeping projects out of the *basement and by that I mean preventing projects from being hidden away and only accessible and used by yourself.Do read on if the following sounds familiar:
  • Start project
  • Finish it (get it to a state where it does what you want)
  • Start using it in some capacity for yourself.
  • Briefly contemplate promoting it but: make excuses that it needs more work, shrugging, hiding under your desk.
  • Start a completely new project

I have a few tips listed below which can help get the project out there. They’re all points I keep in mind personally too.

The project itself

Decent Readme

The first is to write a decent readme explaining what the software does and ideally has all the key stuff like how to contribute, how to ask for help and so forth.

Get them up and running as quickly

Ideally a standalone exe or a single command such as pip install example or apt-get install example. Go on the assumption that a user is mildly interested and may give an installation attempt a few minutes (if you’re lucky) and outline this with in a quickstart heading in the readme.

Getting it out in the open

Find forum posts where people are asking questions.

Think of what questions a user would ask that would lead them to your project. The more specific the better. For example, with the MRISA project I literally googled ‘reverse image search api’ found a user asking for one on stack overflow and popped. Basically all the traffic comes from that post and the project has around 80 stars and multiple contributions. Not bad for 5 mins of ‘marketing’!

The real trick though is to make sure what you are posting is genuinely helping. If you just randomly or insensitively plug your project, it’s going to upset people and backfire.

Submit your project to relevant sites

If your project uses an api, library or has any other dependancy, check the sites and see if they have a place to submit projects.For instance, digitalocean has a projects page which I recently had a project accepted on. The worse they can say is no (I say that as though it’s such a little thing!) and if they come back with suggestions it’s a win because you know what to improve.

I think those four points are particularly useful as they are quite fundamental, should be quickly and easily achievable but have the potential to provide high returns(plenty of visits and users) for minimal investment (takes relatively litte time to implement).

Agree/disagree, have something to add? Let me know in the comments section. Thanks for reading!

* I literally keep my projects on a 1u server in the basement running gogs. But I’m gradually starting to push things onto github

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