Tips for Making a Popular Open-Source Project in 2021 [Ultimate Guide]

1. pyWhat

   1 17 7,212 0.0 Python

   🐸 Identify anything. pyWhat easily lets you identify emails, IP addresses, and more. Feed it a .pcap file or some text and it'll tell you what it is! 🧙‍♀️

   

2. SaaSHub

   www.saashub.com featured

   SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives

   

3. newscatcher

   2 21 2,977 0.0 Python

   Programmatically collect normalized news from (almost) any website.

   

   I have ~4k start in 2 Python libraries. Both help fetch live news articles. Links below.

   These were my first libraries.

   I took the approach of promoting them as any other product. You have to "sell" your code. Even if it's 100% free.

   In my opinion, the most important thing is DEMO. Just make a GIF where you showcase what your software does:

   * 80% of engineers won't even bother to read the description

   No one will spend their precious time trying to get through your code.

   [0] https://github.com/kotartemiy/newscatcher Programmatically collect normalized news from (almost) any website.

   [1] https://github.com/kotartemiy/pygooglenews If Google News had a Python library

4. pygooglenews

   3 9 1,384 3.0 Python

   If Google News had a Python library

   

   I have ~4k start in 2 Python libraries. Both help fetch live news articles. Links below.

   These were my first libraries.

   I took the approach of promoting them as any other product. You have to "sell" your code. Even if it's 100% free.

   In my opinion, the most important thing is DEMO. Just make a GIF where you showcase what your software does:

   * 80% of engineers won't even bother to read the description

   No one will spend their precious time trying to get through your code.

   [0] https://github.com/kotartemiy/newscatcher Programmatically collect normalized news from (almost) any website.

   [1] https://github.com/kotartemiy/pygooglenews If Google News had a Python library

5. GRDB.swift

   4 40 8,444 8.9 Swift

   A toolkit for SQLite databases, with a focus on application development

   

   These are impressive! The use of screenshots and figures really helps. I've also always thought Groue's GRDB is an example of great documentation and readme combination[1].

   [1] https://github.com/groue/GRDB.swift

6. RVS_Spinner

   5 9 25 3.7 Swift

   A Fancy "Popup Prize-Wheel Spinner" UIControl

   

7. SheetJS js-xlsx

   6 69 36,231 2.4 JavaScript

   📗 SheetJS Spreadsheet Data Toolkit -- New home https://git.sheetjs.com/SheetJS/sheetjs

   

   Maybe a story from a maintainer would help. To contextualize, the main SheetJS open source project https://github.com/SheetJS/sheetjs has over 28K stars.

   tl;dr: the project involves "crowdsourced research" which benefits from popularity.

   The main social goal with the project is data preservation and integrity. Large-scale economic and political decisions are made from data and analyses in spreadsheets. For example, last year in the UK, COVID cases were underreported thanks to Excel minutiae https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54423988

   Due to various corporate stratagems, the older data representations were intentionally obfuscated. To support Excel, many developers poked around at Excel files and guessed at the structures.

   In this environment, the biggest challenge is finding worksheets with random corner cases. These types of files are not easy to create and fuzzing has limited effectiveness. This is where open source and popularity come into play. The open source and JS nature of the project helps reduce testing friction (https://oss.sheetjs.com/ runs in the web browser, no need to install anything) and encourage bug reports with test cases.

   There will always be "entitled users" and "low quality bug reports" but that comes with the territory. There are also meaningful issues and code contributions. Efforts at trying to prevent the low quality contributions also discourage higher quality contributions.

8. Ciphey

   7 27 21,451 0.0 Rust

   ⚡ Automatically decrypt encryptions without knowing the key or cipher, decode encodings, and crack hashes ⚡

   

9. RustScan

   8 27 19,886 8.3 Rust

   🤖 The Modern Port Scanner 🤖

   

10. fastapi-azure-auth

    9 17 676 5.6 Python

    Easy and secure implementation of Azure Entra ID (previously AD) for your FastAPI APIs 🔒 B2C, single- and multi-tenant support.

    

    I agree with you. Most my packages are around ~100 stars, and I'm met with a lot of respect and appreciatio.n[1][2]

    My library for Correlation-IDs in Django[3] got implemented by AWX, which also was a nice experience![4] I maintain a lot of small packages, and maybe it is the Django/FastAPI community, but "you'll get a load of entitled users" is straight up not true in my experience.

    [1] https://github.com/Intility/fastapi-azure-auth/issues/24

11. django-guid

    10 6 482 1.5 Python

    Inject an ID into every log message from a Django request. ASGI compatible, integrates with Sentry, and works with Celery

    

12. awx

    11 147 15,442 9.6 Python

    AWX provides a web-based user interface, REST API, and task engine built on top of Ansible. It is one of the upstream projects for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.

    

13. asgi-correlation-id

    12 7 637 6.4 Python

    Request ID propagation for ASGI apps

    

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