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Promoting your project
"Find the balance between annoying spam and shy understatement." - Markus Krotzsch
The objective of this template is to help you get stars and contributors for your open source projects. Attracting attention to your projects has lots of benefits for yourself and for the communities you're part of. The more attention your project gets, the more feedback you’ll receive, the more you can improve as a world-class developer, and so on and so forth. So, here’s a short guide.
The README is the landing page of your product, and as such, should help your audience have a great first impression of your project. This guide will help you write a README that people will love. Browse around your friends’ repositories and those of technologies you admire. Take note of what you like about their READMEs and what you might be able to adapt on your own.
If you don’t have one already, create an account on Reddit (they have subreddits for most languages and frameworks, like Rails, JavaScript, etc…), Hacker News, Medium, and any other platform that has people who might like to see your project. If possible, keep your username consistent across these profiles so you can begin to build a brand for yourself.
Describe your post with a catchy title.
Post on one of the platforms above, and then blast your social media accounts with links to that post.
Caveat: if you post on Hacker News, direct people to https://news.ycombinator.com/newest. Direct links to your post will not result in legitimate upvotes.
Attend Christine’s office hours and get tips on writing a blog post about your experience. Among other possible topics, you could write about why your project is interesting; what you learnt while building it, what your experience has been like contributing to the greater tech community, etc…
The great thing about this process is that you will always have something of value to offer. Whether it’s a project that thousands of people use every day or an inspirational story that convinces other developers that they too can build something new.
You’ve started building a personal brand and providing value to the community. Don’t stop now. Take what you’ve learnt, and iterate, building on your past projects. Build a personal website to collect all of your submissions together. Edit this document with improvements. Keep going!