Advice on gaining contributers to opensource project
I have a small project aimed towards PHP newcomers. I'm having trouble gaining support and finding newbies like me to contribute to it. Can someone give me tips on how I ought to go about doing this?
@thavarshan thats an interesting conundrum. From my own experience, it’s taken me many years to gain confidence to want to contribute to a project. As a newbie that would be the furthest thing from my mind.
Commercially I see developers enter the market from either graduate courses or via code academies (where someone has been in another role previously and then done an intensive course to learn coding). It might be worth looking at meetup.com to identify any groups like that and then approaching them to advertise your project on your behalf.
I’m sure if you drop a link here to your repo you’ll get some uptake. Also do you have to be a newbie to contribute?
Hi, Thanks for replying. You dont necessarily have to be a newbie. I just aimed at newbies because I thought the seasoned pros would just down vote my idea and shut it down.
I've posted on r/PHP (reddit) but I took it down cause nasty comments like this
Contributing to an open source project is a burden, not an opportunity. Besides, it is not clear why should someone contribute to your untidy framework with vague future instead of contributing to some really helpful or recognized project.
I think the idea is cool. But make sure that people can test it out easily and see the benefits it brings. It will make it much more likely that they will actually start using it and start contributing. You can also simple start out by making a package for a popular framework (like laravel). That way there is a bigger chance that someone will pick it up, as it most likely will be usable in the code they have already written. Changing frameworks is a bit of a bigger task. Then once people start using one of your packages, chances are they will look into what other things you have made.
Also ignore people that post negative stuff like that comment on reddit. Yes I can be a burden, but people do it all the time anyways. People will be negative from time to time, but dont let that discourage you. I know how it feels to create something and have 0 interest. But keep working on it for yourself, and hopefully some day others will see what you see :)
I wanted to get a deeper understanding of how Laravel and ultimately PHP works so that's why I decided to make my own little framework, I was hoping other people like me would like to join and so... here we are.
@thavarshan Well try getting the website up and running, and find some reasons why people should give it a go. Perhaps make a tiny example website powered by your framework, to show why it kicks ass :)
