Why I published two projects on Github, and you should too!
A few days ago I have published my first two public projects on Github and as npm packages as well. And I have learned more than I thought from the simple steps along the way. I strongly encourage you to share your ideas too, read on why.
I love BackboneJS. And have made quite some apps, big and small. On the some of the bigger projects I tried to get my code cleaner by introducing things like a Decorator or a Viewstate to my Bacbone.Views. And every time I wrote one of them for a project I noticed I almost wrote it like last time, but not quite. Wether it was my programming style or just a way of initiating the instances, I always got the feeling I was forgetting something or missing some functionality.
I was about to create a Viewstate for a project again last week. But that is when I decided to make a project of it so I wouldn’t have to do it again and again in the future.
The things you don’t normally do
I haven’t had any public projects before. So I looked into the Github page of BackboneJS. The two projects were gonna be extensions to that framework, so I decided to start there. Also, I really really like the Annotated Source of their website. It is where I learned a lot from the framework and has always been a great resource for me. On the Github page I found out that the Annotated Source was actually generated/came from there. So naturally, I wanted to have that as well for my project. Via their repository I found out it was generated via an awesome tool called docco.
Before I knew it my first docs page were generated, looking just like Backbone’s docs. That was somehow a very satisfactional moment. The feeling ‘a real Github project’ was born right there. I wanted to make all the components of a project present.
And it wouldn’t look good without tests. Every project I encounter looked and felt better with some proper tests. But I usually don’t write unit tests especially not ones that look so fancy as those most open source project have. So my next goal was to investigate how the tests of my favorite framework worked.
A broader interest
After I made the tests work, I started on looking into making a npm package of the first project. Along the way you google around and learn more about npm. Publishing a package actually works pretty nice and turned out to be very easy.
After both of my projects were on npm, all tested, on Github pages and documented, I noticed something when browsing my daily dose of websites. One of my favorite daily sites is EchoJS. A ‘hacker news’-like website full of only Javascript news. On that day I actually read 2 articles about Javascript test-frameworks. I almost never gave much attention to them before. Also, I was existed about the npm is the largest package manager post.
My explanation for ‘interest feelings’ is the fact I have published my projects. And because this have gained a broader interest in Javascript projects/news. I have experienced what it is to write comments for documentation, play around with tests, publish something on Github pages. (I mean; did you know you can publish your Github project to a github.io page in like 1 minute.. automatically.. with awesome options for styling.. for free? I didn’t know how simple and genius it actually was until I tried).
Not only my interest changed. I have ALWAYS wanted to write on medium or some blog. But I didn’t have any idea on what to write. But here is my first post, and I don’t have any problem writing it down (okay, except maybe the problems with writing proper English).
Conclusion
Even though maybe only one person would ever use these projects. And even though loads of people might burn it(or me) down. They cannot take my positive experience away. And learning new things is always fun in the end.
