How to create a "usable" project on GitHub

How to create a "usable" project on GitHub

In recent years, GitHub's personal page has gradually become a programmer's job-seeking business card, which fully demonstrates the real programming capabilities that programmers can hardly show in the written test interview. Some companies even said in their recruitment advertisements that as long as the number of stars for the GitHub project reaches a certain number, they will not be admitted to the trial. This also illustrates the problem to some extent-the GitHub project must be used by someone to demonstrate that your software is valuable. So create a "someone is using" project? Barry Clark, a Web developer from New York, gave suggestions based on his own experience.

Barry Clark developed Jekyll Now, which is used by many people to write blogs on GitHub Pages. This project has received more than 1200 fork requests on GitHub. Barry Clark summarized the popularity of this project in his blog.

Clark believes that the software required by the user should be used first. Jekyll is the back-end blog engine of GitHub Pages, but it is very complicated to deploy, so many people are discouraged. Clark captured this pain point and wrote Jekyll Now. It greatly lowers the threshold for using Jekyll. You no longer need to use obscure command line tools or install Ruby. Windows users will feel much more convenient to use.

To solve the pain point, you don't need to build a complete product. You just need to build a prototype so that you can decide whether to use it or not. Then, try out some people who have long been suffering from this pain point among their colleagues and friends as soon as possible and accept their feedback. Of course, whether you can succeed depends on whether the user will use your software.

Clark talked about the second point, allowing users to quickly obtain your software. Hosting code on GitHub is of course a good choice. A brief explanation should be provided for the code library to summarize the core issues solved by the software in one sentence so that people can discover and share it. In addition, the Readme page of the project should be written as detailed as possible.

Third, it is equally important to make software installation as simple as possible. Clark believes:

The simpler the installation, the more people will use your project and contribute to it.

The installation steps should be simplified as much as possible, and the necessary steps should be detailed in Readme. At the same time, ask your friends to try and give feedback.

The last step is publicity. Clark said:

If people cannot find your project, they don't have to talk about it.

He introduced three methods of publicity projects:

• Websites frequently read by potential users
• Emails subscribed by potential users
• Potential users

Clark also compared Hacker News and reddit websites. He believes that Hakers News has a wide audience and a small proportion of potential users, while reddit can target specific user groups to gain greater potential. He used the following methods to promote Jekyll: write a blog to introduce it, and write a tutorial to Smashing Magazine. This tutorial was then forwarded on twitter, it has achieved good results.

The most rewarding part of being an open-source project is to see users benefit from your project. Everyone can contribute useful software to others and hope Clark's suggestions can help everyone.

GitHub tutorials

How to create an organization on GitHub

Usage in GitHub Linux

How to build a GitHub development environment using Eclipse in Windows

Source code for R language 3.0.1 has been submitted to GitHub

Import Maven project to Eclipse4.2 from GitHub

GitHub details: click here
GitHub: click here

Source: infoq Author: http://www.infoq.com/cn/news/2014/10/github-bulid-project: Cao Zhiyuan

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