Publicity in Open-Source

To my relatively small number of followers, it should come as no surprise that my biggest failing is actually getting much visibility for my vast number of open-source projects I write.  To that end I've been doing some research and asking other developers to give me some suggestions on how to get more visibility for me projects.  I've made it a goal for this year to get more visibility for my open-source projects so they will hopefully reach a larger audience.

I decided that I would post the results of my research in a blog post so hopefully others can benefit from this research as well, or at least I can have an easy place to reference back to it for myself.

Speaking / Conferences

The most common suggestion for visibility for a project was speaking about it both in local groups and at conferences.  Several developers said that's how they learned about a useful framework they are using.  This is a good idea and something I'm planning on doing more of this year, even though I really prefer to write code than talk about it, but this is a bit of a longer-term objective than immediate visibility.

Awesome

There are lots of "awesome" lists. Often more than one for each language. This is a no-brainer presuming you can get someone to merge your pull request: https://github.com/bayandin/awesome-awesomeness

Reddit

Apparently there are people that use that site and a common source of information for developers.  I must admit, I haven't been a big user, and this is something I think is going to have to change.  I'll have to get involved in the Scala group and reference my projects there.

Twitter

Yet another thing I am terrible about not keeping up with.  For a very long time I simply had all of my GitHub commits logging to Twitter, but I'm thinking that personalized messages on Twitter with relevant hashtags might be a very good way to get my projects noticed.  Many developers I talked to get most of their news and information from Twitter.

Mailing Lists

Though a bit old-school, this is something a lot of developers still follow and perhaps a good way to get visibility directly into people's inbox of a new framework that should be using.

Based on this research it's clear that my aversion to social media has a direct correlation to my difficulty in getting visibility for my projects.  Shocking right?  I suppose the moral of the story is, if you don't like people, don't expect them to like you either.