TLDR: This post is basically about hardships on project maintaining but, at the same time, gratitude for all of the projects, people and companies that impacted me and helped me get here.

Open source is a wonderful area of computer science and correlated areas: it allows people to share, contribute and learn publicly and grow something together (being it a single project, an organization or even making it a company), but it’s not always as fun as it looks like from the outside of the projects.

Open source side-projects can become real full-time projects depending on the usage and demand for that solution. My first company was first built solely through open source and community (and I’m really grateful for every single contributor, helper, spokesperson and person that helped me lay that path on making it sustainable) and it became a solid business.

But at the same time, the project you are developing may just fix an issue for your own computer/language/website/software/etc, which can be frustrating not getting those GitHub stars and forks.

I have some topics that I learnt from some mentorships I got, keep always on mind these topics (I always try to, but sometimes I fail and struggle as well, and it’’s completely fine):

Always talk to your contributors and learn from them

Your contributors will be your main source of new things to your project, outside of your own context. Talk to them and learn from them. People always can learn from each other.

Talk publicly about your project

This is something I still struggle and I’m trying to keep a commitment on posting more about the projects I’m working on!

But the point is: talk publicly, have that elevator pitch done and tested, have that docs up and running!

It will help you grow your community and make things even better for your project.

Prioritize and Code

One of the most important things is how you prioritize your day, if it’s a side project, get those 2 hours of work on your project every X days or during the week, try to be consistent.

Having a roadmap will help you prioritize what you will do next and help align contributors on what is the path you are aiming on achieving.

Those are my main points, I hope I helped you a bit today on understanding how the open source community works.