Show HN: Lessons learned from my 10 year open source project

7 points

4 years ago

I've been developing SpiderFoot (an OSINT/recon tool) for 10 years now, so wanted to share my story and try to distill some lessons learned in the hope they might be helpful to others here who might be considering writing/open-sourcing their own tools.

Here's the post:

https://medium.com/@micallst/lessons-learned-from-my-10-year-open-source-project-4a4c8c2b4f64

And the repo if you want to check it out:

https://github.com/smicallef/spiderfoot

TL;DR version of lessons from the post..

Lesson 1: Writing open source software can be very rewarding in ways you can’t predict

Lesson 2: Be in it for the long haul

Lesson 3: Ship it and ship regularly

Lesson 4: Have broad, open-ended goals

Lesson 5: If you care enough, you’ll find the time

Lesson 6: No one cares about your unit test coverage

Lesson 7: There’s no shame in marketing

Lesson 8: Clear it with your employer

Lesson 9: Foster community

Lesson 10: Keep it enjoyable

I hope you find it useful and inspires some of you to get your project out there!

Feel free to ask me any questions here and I'll do my best to answer.

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