Open Source, an Adventure

Ehsan Ghorbani — Fri, 13 Aug 2021 18:22:11 +0000

Hi :D

Today I want to tell you a story of mine, which caused me some serious questions.

The lazy geek

My story started about a month ago, someone asked me : " Hey! Can you write me a Telegram bot with this features ? ", I said " Yes! just give me a week "

The next week was the week of learn & search. I learned how to write a simple bot in my language (PHP), learned some new concepts in PHP, and the most important part, I searched for some libraries and packages written in PHP for developing a bot in Telegram. I found some, I looked into their instructions and documents, and I started to think : " These guys made it so complex, I don't get it at all! ". I'm a bit lazy to, so I decided :

I'm gonna make a library for this job which I understand better and looks simpler

Making Frankenstein monster

I started my (very-first open-source) package, Phelegram!
I was so excited at first. I learned so much more about Github, Git, Making good READMEs for my package, Licenses, new things about PHP, Software engineering ideas, design patterns, and more! I made Phelegram piece by piece, added new tags week by week, and committed new changes and bug fixes day by day. I showed it to a friend and he sayed : " Man! This is amazing! It looks like a real-world package! "

It was a good time. I learned a lot, felt the real success that pro programmers talk about when they achieve victory, and gained self-confidence.

Unill...

Questions made Disappointment !?

I faced some serious bugs, that would make me change the whole code, and it was not easy. While i was thinking for major changes in code, I faced a weird question: " Why am I doing this ? "
I made the bot for my friend weeks before this question, and I didn't have another project to do with this.

My project was much better and bigger. BUT I couldn't answer the question because I got 2 bad reasons to stop the project:

It was taking most of my time, Although my time was free, but developing speed was too slow, and it didn't lead to any successes. This was hurting me.
The worse reason: MY PACKAGE DIDN'T HAVE ANYTHING BETTER THAN OTHER ONES! I started this project to make something better and easy to use. but at this point, I looked at my project, and I said to myself: >" It's far behind the other ones, Nobody has a reason to leave the other packages and use mine :( "
It was limited, means that Telegram bot's have a limited features and I was at the start while others were far beyond the end.

Cutting the tree

Two days ago, I stopped the project for the reasons I said. I really liked it, and i wonder _Where do others get their ideas and motivation for their open-source project ? _
That question got my attention and I thought it's a good topic to discuss with others who are better than me and done some open-source projects. Where's better than dev community :D

I'll be pleased if you answer my question or share your ideas with me, and help me to get another idea for another project, or a reason to resume Phelegram :D

Thanks for reading this post! And sorry if I'm not good at english :)

DEV Community: Ehsan Ghorbani

Open Source, an Adventure

The lazy geek

Making Frankenstein monster

Questions made Disappointment !?

Cutting the tree