I just pushed an effort at Linode to open source our new manager website: <a href="https://github.com/Linode/manager" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Linode/manager</a><p>I think it will avoid these pitfalls. It is a learning resource because I hope that someone will read it instead of spending the weeks we had to spend figuring out how to set up the ideal frontend web project in 2016. I also hope that it'll get some exposure among those millions of open source JavaScript projects by simply inheriting our customerbase.<p>Unfortunately, though, I don't realistically see many external contributions coming into the manager. It hits all of the points that make it easy to contribute (it's not my first open source project by a wide margin), but I would be surprised to see many contributions despite that.
Open-sourcing side projects is fun only if you care about those or until they become more popular. One of the tiny libraries I developed some time ago has 1000+ stars as of today, and though I have no interest in developing it any further, I keep receiving bug reports, questions or pull requests. The questions tend to be on the silly side, most pull requests would break the code for others. Most of the time it's a pain really, yet, I have to keep it out there and make it available on Cocoapods too, mostly because the last thing I want is to break other dev's projects.
I fear that opening sourcing my personal projects would work against me. The code that i develop in my spare time is done for my own benefit, and just for fun - no documentations, no unit tests, and there are hacks there which i'm proud of.<p>I fear a future employer would look at that code and think that is how I write code in professional environment.
This article seems relevant for my situation. A few days ago I released project management software called Wheatbin: <a href="http://wheatbin.com" rel="nofollow">http://wheatbin.com</a>. It's my first contribution to Open Source.<p>The github repo is here: <a href="https://github.com/wheatbin/wheatbin" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/wheatbin/wheatbin</a><p>The software works great for my needs, but it would be nice to see Wheatbin evolve through community involvement. I wasn't sure if that happened organically or if there were things I could do to get that started.
Please take a look at the new Core Infrastructure Initiative Best Practices Badge. <a href="https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/" rel="nofollow">https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/</a><p>It helps list what it takes to have a project that is usable by others and to which they can easily contribute.
Thanks for writing this.<p>It lists many reasons why I don't open source my side projects.<p>Open sourcing is meanigless without considerable additional work in form of quality assurance, documentation, project management, marketing.<p>As a developer you should weight whether it is worth the cost for the return of exactly what? Getting your stuff out there? Developer street credits? Maybe a consulting gig down the road?<p>Or is your time better spent doing other things?