Ask HN: How long does it take for you to release your open source project?

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • compact-float

    An encoding scheme to store a floating point value in as few bytes as possible.

  • https://concise-encoding.org/ will be released this year and has been in development for 5 years. This one has been slow because of all the support projects such as https://github.com/kstenerud/compact-float and https://github.com/kstenerud/compact-time and https://github.com/kstenerud/enctool

    https://github.com/kstenerud/dogma has been in development for 4 months and will be released in about a month. This is yet another support project for Concise Encoding (hopefully the last!).

    https://github.com/kstenerud/kscrash was in development for about a year and a half before being released.

    https://github.com/kstenerud/Musashi took just under a year before its first release as a MAME core (after a TON of testing - I spent 4x more time testing it than I did writing it).

    But other smaller things that don't require so much precision I just write up in a couple of weeks and release, such as https://github.com/kstenerud/virtual-builders

    The key is to build empathy with your potential users. What will their motivations be that lead them to try out your project? What will they be looking for when they use it? What would someone who has never seen the project before struggle with? (that last one is the hardest because you're so close to the project that it's hard to see what it's like to know nothing about it). These tell you what kind of UX you'll need, what kind of documents you'll need, what kind of tutorials you'll need, how to structure your project for your target audience, etc ("it's for everybody" is never a good idea).

    A lot of times it comes down to recruiting people to just try it and do a brain dump of everything that goes wrong or frustrates or confuses them. I've done show-HN posts for things that are unreleased, just to get the valuable criticism. It's nearly impossible to develop good projects in a vacuum.

    If you're not posting out of worry for doing it wrong, THAT is doing it wrong. The point is to find out where you're doing it wrong so that you can correct it! And that's where the crowd is a HUGE help.

  • compact-time

    Encoding schemes to store a complete time, date, or timestamp in as few bytes as possible for data transmission.

  • https://concise-encoding.org/ will be released this year and has been in development for 5 years. This one has been slow because of all the support projects such as https://github.com/kstenerud/compact-float and https://github.com/kstenerud/compact-time and https://github.com/kstenerud/enctool

    https://github.com/kstenerud/dogma has been in development for 4 months and will be released in about a month. This is yet another support project for Concise Encoding (hopefully the last!).

    https://github.com/kstenerud/kscrash was in development for about a year and a half before being released.

    https://github.com/kstenerud/Musashi took just under a year before its first release as a MAME core (after a TON of testing - I spent 4x more time testing it than I did writing it).

    But other smaller things that don't require so much precision I just write up in a couple of weeks and release, such as https://github.com/kstenerud/virtual-builders

    The key is to build empathy with your potential users. What will their motivations be that lead them to try out your project? What will they be looking for when they use it? What would someone who has never seen the project before struggle with? (that last one is the hardest because you're so close to the project that it's hard to see what it's like to know nothing about it). These tell you what kind of UX you'll need, what kind of documents you'll need, what kind of tutorials you'll need, how to structure your project for your target audience, etc ("it's for everybody" is never a good idea).

    A lot of times it comes down to recruiting people to just try it and do a brain dump of everything that goes wrong or frustrates or confuses them. I've done show-HN posts for things that are unreleased, just to get the valuable criticism. It's nearly impossible to develop good projects in a vacuum.

    If you're not posting out of worry for doing it wrong, THAT is doing it wrong. The point is to find out where you're doing it wrong so that you can correct it! And that's where the crowd is a HUGE help.

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

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  • dogma

    Dogma: A modernized metalanguage with better expressiveness and binary grammar support (by kstenerud)

  • https://concise-encoding.org/ will be released this year and has been in development for 5 years. This one has been slow because of all the support projects such as https://github.com/kstenerud/compact-float and https://github.com/kstenerud/compact-time and https://github.com/kstenerud/enctool

    https://github.com/kstenerud/dogma has been in development for 4 months and will be released in about a month. This is yet another support project for Concise Encoding (hopefully the last!).

    https://github.com/kstenerud/kscrash was in development for about a year and a half before being released.

    https://github.com/kstenerud/Musashi took just under a year before its first release as a MAME core (after a TON of testing - I spent 4x more time testing it than I did writing it).

    But other smaller things that don't require so much precision I just write up in a couple of weeks and release, such as https://github.com/kstenerud/virtual-builders

    The key is to build empathy with your potential users. What will their motivations be that lead them to try out your project? What will they be looking for when they use it? What would someone who has never seen the project before struggle with? (that last one is the hardest because you're so close to the project that it's hard to see what it's like to know nothing about it). These tell you what kind of UX you'll need, what kind of documents you'll need, what kind of tutorials you'll need, how to structure your project for your target audience, etc ("it's for everybody" is never a good idea).

    A lot of times it comes down to recruiting people to just try it and do a brain dump of everything that goes wrong or frustrates or confuses them. I've done show-HN posts for things that are unreleased, just to get the valuable criticism. It's nearly impossible to develop good projects in a vacuum.

    If you're not posting out of worry for doing it wrong, THAT is doing it wrong. The point is to find out where you're doing it wrong so that you can correct it! And that's where the crowd is a HUGE help.

  • KSCrash

    The Ultimate iOS Crash Reporter

  • https://concise-encoding.org/ will be released this year and has been in development for 5 years. This one has been slow because of all the support projects such as https://github.com/kstenerud/compact-float and https://github.com/kstenerud/compact-time and https://github.com/kstenerud/enctool

    https://github.com/kstenerud/dogma has been in development for 4 months and will be released in about a month. This is yet another support project for Concise Encoding (hopefully the last!).

    https://github.com/kstenerud/kscrash was in development for about a year and a half before being released.

    https://github.com/kstenerud/Musashi took just under a year before its first release as a MAME core (after a TON of testing - I spent 4x more time testing it than I did writing it).

    But other smaller things that don't require so much precision I just write up in a couple of weeks and release, such as https://github.com/kstenerud/virtual-builders

    The key is to build empathy with your potential users. What will their motivations be that lead them to try out your project? What will they be looking for when they use it? What would someone who has never seen the project before struggle with? (that last one is the hardest because you're so close to the project that it's hard to see what it's like to know nothing about it). These tell you what kind of UX you'll need, what kind of documents you'll need, what kind of tutorials you'll need, how to structure your project for your target audience, etc ("it's for everybody" is never a good idea).

    A lot of times it comes down to recruiting people to just try it and do a brain dump of everything that goes wrong or frustrates or confuses them. I've done show-HN posts for things that are unreleased, just to get the valuable criticism. It's nearly impossible to develop good projects in a vacuum.

    If you're not posting out of worry for doing it wrong, THAT is doing it wrong. The point is to find out where you're doing it wrong so that you can correct it! And that's where the crowd is a HUGE help.

  • Musashi

    Motorola 680x0 emulator written in C

  • https://concise-encoding.org/ will be released this year and has been in development for 5 years. This one has been slow because of all the support projects such as https://github.com/kstenerud/compact-float and https://github.com/kstenerud/compact-time and https://github.com/kstenerud/enctool

    https://github.com/kstenerud/dogma has been in development for 4 months and will be released in about a month. This is yet another support project for Concise Encoding (hopefully the last!).

    https://github.com/kstenerud/kscrash was in development for about a year and a half before being released.

    https://github.com/kstenerud/Musashi took just under a year before its first release as a MAME core (after a TON of testing - I spent 4x more time testing it than I did writing it).

    But other smaller things that don't require so much precision I just write up in a couple of weeks and release, such as https://github.com/kstenerud/virtual-builders

    The key is to build empathy with your potential users. What will their motivations be that lead them to try out your project? What will they be looking for when they use it? What would someone who has never seen the project before struggle with? (that last one is the hardest because you're so close to the project that it's hard to see what it's like to know nothing about it). These tell you what kind of UX you'll need, what kind of documents you'll need, what kind of tutorials you'll need, how to structure your project for your target audience, etc ("it's for everybody" is never a good idea).

    A lot of times it comes down to recruiting people to just try it and do a brain dump of everything that goes wrong or frustrates or confuses them. I've done show-HN posts for things that are unreleased, just to get the valuable criticism. It's nearly impossible to develop good projects in a vacuum.

    If you're not posting out of worry for doing it wrong, THAT is doing it wrong. The point is to find out where you're doing it wrong so that you can correct it! And that's where the crowd is a HUGE help.

  • virtual-builders

    Builds various virtual environments

  • https://concise-encoding.org/ will be released this year and has been in development for 5 years. This one has been slow because of all the support projects such as https://github.com/kstenerud/compact-float and https://github.com/kstenerud/compact-time and https://github.com/kstenerud/enctool

    https://github.com/kstenerud/dogma has been in development for 4 months and will be released in about a month. This is yet another support project for Concise Encoding (hopefully the last!).

    https://github.com/kstenerud/kscrash was in development for about a year and a half before being released.

    https://github.com/kstenerud/Musashi took just under a year before its first release as a MAME core (after a TON of testing - I spent 4x more time testing it than I did writing it).

    But other smaller things that don't require so much precision I just write up in a couple of weeks and release, such as https://github.com/kstenerud/virtual-builders

    The key is to build empathy with your potential users. What will their motivations be that lead them to try out your project? What will they be looking for when they use it? What would someone who has never seen the project before struggle with? (that last one is the hardest because you're so close to the project that it's hard to see what it's like to know nothing about it). These tell you what kind of UX you'll need, what kind of documents you'll need, what kind of tutorials you'll need, how to structure your project for your target audience, etc ("it's for everybody" is never a good idea).

    A lot of times it comes down to recruiting people to just try it and do a brain dump of everything that goes wrong or frustrates or confuses them. I've done show-HN posts for things that are unreleased, just to get the valuable criticism. It's nearly impossible to develop good projects in a vacuum.

    If you're not posting out of worry for doing it wrong, THAT is doing it wrong. The point is to find out where you're doing it wrong so that you can correct it! And that's where the crowd is a HUGE help.

  • go-concise-encoding

    Golang implementation of Concise Binary and Text Encoding

  • I'm not sure, TBH... Maybe I'm just a glutton for punishment?

    I'm currently partway through refactoring all of the portable unit tests for Concise Encoding ( https://github.com/kstenerud/go-concise-encoding/tree/master... ) and it is a SLOG! I mean, so goddamn boring and tedious that I wanna stick an ice pick through my skull. There's easily another 200 hours of this terrible work ahead and I'll be right back to it the moment Dogma v1 is published in a few weeks (Dogma has been kind of a vacation from it in a lot of ways).

    Do I dread it? Yes. Am I still going to do it? Yes. Because at the end of the day I want to be able to stand back and say "I made that. I completed it - ALL of it. It's not perfect, but it's doing its job and people are using it."

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NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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