Apr 11, 2023

From "It Works For Me" To "It Works"

There is some significant work to get software from "it works for me" to "it actually works".

I recently went through that exercise. And I did it in my spare time, for fun.

It is interesting releasing software as Open Source. You will get a lot of feedback. Some of it you asked for, and some of it you didn't. There will be people who have opinions on the validity of your efforts. Some of those opinions will be tough to receive.

As I was writing this software, I realized that what I wanted to do didn't always meet the expectations of people around me. I also realized that some of what it takes to maintain Open Source software is much more than writing code. It is about maintaining relationships with people who might be stakeholders of this code.

All I wanted to do was fix an issue and make the world a slightly better place (granted, in a very microscopic way).

What I realized was that to do that, I also needed people to buy in to the value that I was providing. I needed people to actually trust me.

I tend to assume that people are good (at least until they prove otherwise), and therefore I assumed that other people would also assume that I am good.

That turns out not to always be true.

So I needed to do some explanation of what the service I provided does and also of how it does the things it does.

The original website basically said:

If you give me an access token, then I'll make it "Just Work" (tm).

That turned out not to be quite good enough (obviously).

Marketing With Code

So I had to do some marketing.

The first round of marketing was building a much better website.

The second round (which I just completed), was to make it possible for people to actually run the service themselves.

I have had deployment scripts that I never included in the Open Source part of the software (because my internal deployment is none of your business).

Those have now been complemented by actual deployment descriptions and a docker-compose.yml file which you can now use to actually run the code yourself.

I was always saying that you could build and deploy this on your own server if you wanted to. Now you actually stand a chance of getting it to run.

Now there is a README file which describes what the software is and what it does - and more importantly: How you can get it to do the thing yourself if you want to.

You should go and read it now.

You should also go and deploy it on your own server, just for fun, just because you can!