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Show HN: Lessons learned from my 10 year open source project
I've been developing SpiderFoot (an OSINT/recon tool) for 10 years now, so wanted to share my story and try to distill some lessons learned in the hope they might be helpful to others here who might be considering writing/open-sourcing their own tools.
Here's the post:
https://medium.com/@micallst/lessons-learned-from-my-10-year-open-source-project-4a4c8c2b4f64
And the repo if you want to check it out:
https://github.com/smicallef/spiderfoot
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TL;DR version of lessons from the post..
Lesson 1: Writing open source software can be very rewarding in ways you can’t predict
Lesson 2: Be in it for the long haul
Lesson 3: Ship it and ship regularly
Lesson 4: Have broad, open-ended goals
Lesson 5: If you care enough, you’ll find the time
Lesson 6: No one cares about your unit test coverage
Lesson 7: There’s no shame in marketing
Lesson 8: Clear it with your employer
Lesson 9: Foster community
Lesson 10: Keep it enjoyable
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I hope you find it useful and inspires some of you to get your project out there!
Feel free to ask me any questions here and I'll do my best to answer.
- verdverm 5y agoI would add "spend as much time on documentation and examples as you do coding" I'd also suggest using the URL in the submission and adding the post as a first comment. Click through will be much better if there is a clickable link
- kazinator 5y agoNo one cares about your unit test coverage, or lack thereof, but it's often the reason why you're finding a 11 year old bug in your 12 year old project and it's something that's not even a regression: it never worked!
- aaronbrethorst 5y agoLesson 6: No one cares about your unit test coverage Unit tests are often the only way I can puzzle out how a feature in a library is supposed to work, given that documentation is often either out of date or nonexistent.