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I get many stars on my last project but no issues or PR. It feels quite lonely and, more importantly, I can't know if my work is going in a good direction. I t

I get many stars on my last project but no issues or PR. It feels quite lonely and, more importantly, I can't know if my work is going in a good direction. I think people mainly use stars as bookmark.

necessary 4y ago
Is there an established way that people advertise their open source projects to developers for help? I know that GitHub has exploration features but when I last used them it felt like looking for a needle in a haystack.
- alcover 4y ago
  Not that I know of. Especially for C. I resorted to re-post to reddit when I reach a subjective milestone but the returns are slim. Also I hear people may dislike such an auto-promoting endeavour... First time I posted an early naive version of my string lib, the thread became a deluge of 500+ reactions and constructive advice. Subsequent submissions with a much better work got me depressed.
cube2222 4y ago
I recommend adding telemetry to your project for this (and I know a lot of people feel strongly about this, so I'll add: with a very easy way of disabling it). In OctoSQL[0] I'm literally just sending JSON files with coarse information about 1. invocations of the CLI, 2. features used in these invocations, to a VM on DigitalOcean (with a 10-line server receiving them and writing to a JSON file - which I can then process using OctoSQL itself). Thanks to this I knew that until recently most of what I had were stars, not actual usage, and could also see how the big rewrite I released in January (and the following updates) made a lot of people start actually using it since. Very nice feeling :) All telemetry logic in OctoSQL is actually contained in a single short file[1]. PS: Keep in mind that https requests take a long time, as they need to do a few roundtrips for the TLS handshake. Don't do that on every invocation if you have latency-sensitive invocations. I.e. in OctoSQL I'm only sending aggregated telemetry data every 10 invocations (as well as on the very first one). [0]:https://github.com/cube2222/octosql https://github.com/cube2222/octosql [1]:https://github.com/cube2222/octosql/blob/main/telemetry/telemetry.go https://github.com/cube2222/octosql/blob/main/telemetry/tele...
- nyellin 4y ago
  Octosql looks very cool! Thanks for posting. Also agree with you about telemetry. We send some minimal telemetry in Robusta (also easily disabled) and it's been a big help for us as a project. https://github.com/robusta-dev/robusta https://github.com/robusta-dev/robusta
- dataangel 4y ago
  do you warn users about the telemetry? OSS users and developers in particular are pretty hostile to it, especially when it's default
  - cube2222 4y ago
    Please judge for yourself in this asciinema I've just uploaded whether it's enough of a warning: https://asciinema.org/a/eWQsyXQKi1fmithyTekAD5fWS https://asciinema.org/a/eWQsyXQKi1fmithyTekAD5fWS
    - natebc 4y ago
      That is a very clear and helpful message. You may want to consider mentioning it in the README.md as well and alongside any example/default configuration you generate indicating the default state and setting to disable it, especially if it's only output the first time it writes the telemetry history.
fuzzythinker 4y ago
I think of stars as encouragement, so I give them when it has fewer than a few-k stars and is well maintained, or if not, to encourage it.

necessary 4y ago

Is there an established way that people advertise their open source projects to developers for help? I know that GitHub has exploration features but when I last used them it felt like looking for a needle in a haystack.

alcover 4y ago
Not that I know of. Especially for C. I resorted to re-post to reddit when I reach a subjective milestone but the returns are slim. Also I hear people may dislike such an auto-promoting endeavour... First time I posted an early naive version of my string lib, the thread became a deluge of 500+ reactions and constructive advice. Subsequent submissions with a much better work got me depressed.

cube2222 4y ago

I recommend adding telemetry to your project for this (and I know a lot of people feel strongly about this, so I'll add: with a very easy way of disabling it). In OctoSQL[0] I'm literally just sending JSON files with coarse information about 1. invocations of the CLI, 2. features used in these invocations, to a VM on DigitalOcean (with a 10-line server receiving them and writing to a JSON file - which I can then process using OctoSQL itself). Thanks to this I knew that until recently most of what I had were stars, not actual usage, and could also see how the big rewrite I released in January (and the following updates) made a lot of people start actually using it since. Very nice feeling :) All telemetry logic in OctoSQL is actually contained in a single short file[1]. PS: Keep in mind that https requests take a long time, as they need to do a few roundtrips for the TLS handshake. Don't do that on every invocation if you have latency-sensitive invocations. I.e. in OctoSQL I'm only sending aggregated telemetry data every 10 invocations (as well as on the very first one). [0]:https://github.com/cube2222/octosql https://github.com/cube2222/octosql [1]:https://github.com/cube2222/octosql/blob/main/telemetry/telemetry.go https://github.com/cube2222/octosql/blob/main/telemetry/tele...

nyellin 4y ago
Octosql looks very cool! Thanks for posting. Also agree with you about telemetry. We send some minimal telemetry in Robusta (also easily disabled) and it's been a big help for us as a project. https://github.com/robusta-dev/robusta https://github.com/robusta-dev/robusta
dataangel 4y ago
do you warn users about the telemetry? OSS users and developers in particular are pretty hostile to it, especially when it's default
- cube2222 4y ago
  Please judge for yourself in this asciinema I've just uploaded whether it's enough of a warning: https://asciinema.org/a/eWQsyXQKi1fmithyTekAD5fWS https://asciinema.org/a/eWQsyXQKi1fmithyTekAD5fWS
  - natebc 4y ago
    That is a very clear and helpful message. You may want to consider mentioning it in the README.md as well and alongside any example/default configuration you generate indicating the default state and setting to disable it, especially if it's only output the first time it writes the telemetry history.

fuzzythinker 4y ago

I think of stars as encouragement, so I give them when it has fewer than a few-k stars and is well maintained, or if not, to encourage it.