This may be too broad of a question, but I’m going to ask it anyway.
I’ve written some tools that are open source and hosted on gitlab/github. I have actually had a few random people show up and create issues on somethings, but I feel like there’s more I could do to let people know about the software. It’s nothing completely revolutionary, but some quality of life improvement things like a json - golang converter and more recently and interactive ‘jq’ builder.
Is there an organic way to promote these sort of things besides asking popular YouTube celebrities and waiting for random internet wanderers?
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The simplest option could be to write a seed article about your project and try to feed that to different websites for a writeup. Short of paid advertising that’s the best idea I’ve come up with for my open source projects.
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Probably enhancing the readme would be good idea too. Especially for the interactive jq builder you don’t really have any idea looking at it what it would do for you.
For instance look at something like this: GitHub - nvbn/thefuck: Magnificent app which corrects your previous console command.
Yes, thats mainly a meme project I’m pretty sure (never used it either, it stuck in memory though). They have a gif there in the readme that gives you a very clear idea of what that software would do. For small projects like these I think that is a very good way to do it. Obviously, for more complex software you are gonna need a more fleshed out documentation. One gif won’t do the job then.
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That’s absolutely true. I literally just wrote ijq the other day so that’s probably not the best example but that’s definitely needed
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There is a Show section on Hacker News where you can show off whatever you made. People give all sorts of feedback in those threads.
I would enhance the readme before posting there though so you don’t just get ‘Make a better readme’ comments.
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Submit patches to package repos, availability is key and people will notice
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