Getting Traction for an Open Source Project

Getting Traction for an Open Source Project

Kimmo Brunfeldt, December/2014

• Hi, I'm Kimmo Brunfeldt from Futurice
• Sorry about voice
• I do a lot of open source stuff

• I recently made this library called progressbar.js
• It is a library which can be used to create bars
• You make any shape a progress bar with using SVG paths
• Almost everything in these slides are learnings from the project
• Needed in personal project, decided to make own

ProgressBar.js statistics

• 45 000 visitors
• 65 000 page views
• >3k stars in GitHub

• Countries, people, page views, stars in one month

Steps to a good project

• Explain steps
• I’ll go through the steps in the perspective of Progressbar.js project

• Or just make a senseless project which consumes ridiculous amount of time, like Arnold C

Solve an existing problem

• You have probably found bunch of issues while doing other projects
• Others have dealt with the same problem but haven't yet packaged it
• When doing progress bar I found the following problems:

Problems with current solutions

• Sometimes using a library doesn't just feel right
• Depends on jQuery (the usual), No animation support
• Weird API, It was made 10 years ago
• Looks like was made 10 years ago
• Think of all annoying parts in other open source projects

Lousy documentation?

• Documenting is super important
• Bunch of code without explanation isn't very interesting

Lack of examples?

• Easiest way to get hang of the lib API is example
• Without example it takes much more time to get working code

No tests?

• Tests give you some idea of how quality oriented the project is
• Finally, search before rolling sleeves
• Easy to miss existing projects with wrong key words

Gift wrap it

• Then fix those problems in your new shiny project
• Present it nicely and you'll get users

• Make it easy
• People want to try out the new thing without hassle
• Provide a js fiddle link. It'll take one second to start testing the library
• Have a demo page to show more examples

• Help getting started by having a full example of how to use and install the library
• Here I have a few examples which contain the whole package, HTML, CSS and JS

• To get started, people want examples. But later on they need specific documentation
• of each method and attribute. Have an API documentation to help actually using the library
• I think the API doc has failed if you still have to look into source code sometimes

• Help contributors and advice them how to contribute to the project
• Try to document everything
• Prepare for the day you lose interest
• Prepare the project to be maintained by others

Gift wrapping takes time

(That's 20 working days)

• Takes loads of time
• Progressbar.js was a bit overkill but I wanted to make it as good as I can

Share it at the right time

to the correct channels

Get initial buzz

• Try to get a big "boom" to the start
• Try to get as much people as possible to see it inside 24h
• Getting to daily trending repos in GitHub is good
• It means: "most starred repos in past 24h"

• Think of the time zones before sharing
• I shared progressbar.js on Tuesday 3pm
• Colleagues share before leaving work
• When you put something online at 3pm, people in san fransico haven't woken up yet

Traffic

• This is traffic in google analytics for the first 3 weeks from progressbar.js demo page
• After the first 3 weeks, the view counts have dropped to 500 per day
• It's important that the library shows up in google search

Where to share

• Friends and colleagues
• Reddit (500k in /r/programming)
• Hacker News
• Popular news letter (JavaScript Weekly 77k)
• Popular blog authors (DailyJS, Tympanus 50k-100k)

• There are tons of blogs all over the world
• Most of the mass comes from reddit, news letters and blogs
• Traffic from twitter is suprisingly small
• Reddit and hackernews have lot of cheat detections
• Always link to newest list and search for title

Help people

• Answer to StackOverflow
• Comment on related blog posts
• Open issue to GitHub project

• Comment to relevant questions in Stack overflow
• Help project author to find your new thing with issue

Maintain

• Important to keep project alive and maintained
• Even if the code is still good, it might scare people if nothing
• has been done for a few years

Answer to issues and pull requests

• Bootstrap has over 10k closed issues
• If twitter died, someone else would maintain it

Don't kill the project

• Don't throw away the effort for good
• Others are probably still using your project
• Allow others to continue your work
• Don't lock it behind your github account and kill the project

Find new maintainers

• You can always find new maintainers like TJ hollowaychuck did

When to release?

• Your code doesn't need to be perfect
• Documentation and demos are most important

Share your projects!

• This may sound a bit too self promoting
• If you have put effort to a project
• then it's good that other people with the same problem can find your work
• You probably have some projects too, share them!