ATatomashpolskiy·Nov 8, 2017Recommendation phrase
I'm the author and the only maintainer of Bt, Java 8 BitTorrent library: https://github.com/atomashpolskiy/bt. As of today, it has received 1136 stars.
I've started it quite literally to scratch my own itch: after having upgraded to a newer OS X, I found out that my favorite torrent client does not launch anymore. I've already been thinking about starting my own OSS project for some time (I contribute to a number of OSS as part of my job), so the decision came naturally to me.
It was clear to me upfront, that at some point the project will become too large for one person to take care of everything, and I will have to look for co-maintainers. So from the very beginning I've been spending a lot of time writing documentation, examples and polishing README, and of course paying a lot of attention to overall design "quality".
All of these thin
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gs paid off, and each posting, be it on Reddit, StackOverflow, Quora or HN, received some attention, stars and downloads. People have started to post bugs and questions, and this contributed considerably to my motivation to continue working on the project.
In August I've added a GIF animation of the CLI component to the README and submitted a yet another ShowHN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14911372. It was a blast! The project received several hundred of stars over the course of two days, and the feedback was also very insightful and helpful.
> do you think it's unfair to just work on something you like but never take the time to get the word out
I honestly believe, that this is in fact an obligation for the author to get the word out, IF the project might be of interest to someone besides the author himself. Otherwise, why make this software open source in the first place?
I'd also recommend the following read for a more step-by-step advice on marketing of amateur OSS projects: https://blog.cwrichardkim.com/how-to-get-hundreds-of-stars-o....