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Ask HN: What obstacles are you facing with your Open Source project?

2 points by braydentw ↗ HN
I’ve tried launching a couple small open source projects in my time and it has been tough.

Hard to gain an audience. Hard to build a community. And many more.

Why is this?

Well, I’m not sure. There is obviously something in a developer’s path that blocks them from achieving their goals.

Is there something that would make building/launching/growing your open-source project easier?

Let us know in the comments below so we can help you out!

4 comments

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0x1DEADCA0
I have found a little bit of success writing my own single file projects (no fancy web servers or build pipelines) and directly messaging people that I think would like to use it. They haven't grown organically from there yet, but I haven't tried to make the projects grow organically either.

The people who use my files seem pretty happy and get a kick out of them. I've written a few games and a few utilities like a flashcard generator, a practice exam generator, and higher level objects for other frameworks.

I wish the world would release more barebones and easy to use projects like these, but it seems that more people are obsessed with using the latest tech du jour.

etewiah
Perhaps seek out and join a similar open source project before launching one of your own....
0x1DEADCA0
It is not easy to join an open source project these days because usually the code base is convoluted and trying to fix issues requires a ton of context.

It's like the difference between writing your first sentence in English and writing a screenplay.

braydentw
Agreed. I just joined one (will not name it) and the team is already kind of far ahead on things and they don’t organize meetings to bring me up to date on the codebase and what they are doing.