My open-source project hit 2k stars

Okay, before you go ahead and look: I lied

Let me explain :)

https://iHateRegex.io/ is a project I launched in February this year.
It is basically a regular expression cheat sheet with neat visualizations and explanations for common expressions.

As of writing this article, it has 1,987 stars on GitHub. And it is only a matter of a few hours to reach 2,000:

https://github.com/geongeorge/i-hate-regex/

In my defense, Github did round that number to 2k anyway.

I'm super stoked about this🔥.

But that is not the only reason why I'm writing this article.

(Sorry about the long content. I didn't want to add gifs or unwanted images here)

Some Context

I started working on this in August 2019. This took around half a year to complete.

Now, this might look like a very simple application from outside and I'm not arguing. It is in fact very easy to create.

At the time I had no idea what I was creating. I had no clue what I was aiming for. I had college in the morning and I worked as a freelance developer at night. Also had a few products for which I provided support.

And here I was with a domain - ihateregex.io hoping to make a regular expression cheat sheet with.

To be honest, I didn't even know what I should include, how to present this, and had 100s of questions like this.

Halfway through making this I remember writing this in my blog:

I spend a lot of time on this. But as I was nearing the launch, my old pal Imposter Syndrome kicked in. I felt it wasn’t worth my effort and that I’m gonna be made fun of because of how useless it is. - from my blog

I felt like an imposter, I'm not a regular expression expert myself, People would make fun of how stupid the domain was.

One month had passed after writing the above blog.

One day, mustering up some courage I just decided to release this on product hunt.

The Launch

Here I was, hunting my first product in product hunt. I asked a few friends for advice and decided to press the submit button. I shared this with a few friends and told them to try this product.

PEOPLE LOVED IT!

• I was getting upvotes left and right.
• This was getting shared everywhere.
• I posted this on hacker news and I woke up the next day to see it's already #3 on hacker news.
• This ended up becoming the number #2 Product of the day on product hunt.

I shared this on Dev.to and people started buying me coffee and got lots of amazing feedback :)

I even got sponsorship from the amazing people at Datree

Today

Skip to today and the product has (almost) 2k stars on Github.
People are submitting expressions, many have bookmarked this as their goto regex tool.

If you have something in your mind just make it. Give to the world the things you make and you never know what will happen.
The problem (I think) is we all try to predict the future. With all our biases and fears we end up choosing the path more traveled. the safe path. And if that is a good or bad choice is up to you.

Make sure to give me a follow on twitter.

I tweet about my journey as a maker:

https://twitter.com/geongeorgek/

Thank you for reading :)

Comments

[Tom Lasswell]

Fantastic. You're now actually over 2k.

Regex is such a complicated but powerful expression language. The fact you're not only providing the regex expression but explaining it visually is what makes this great.

Good luck in your future endeavors

[Geon George]

Thank you Tom :)
Yeah, regex is hard to look at sometimes. Hence the name

[Wannes Gennar]

Just a heads up that your email regex isn't 100% RFC compliant.
The "complex" email regex seems to cover most bases, but calling it "Unnecessarily complicated" makes me think that most people will use the simple version.

this article is an interesting read on the subject: davidcel.is/posts/stop-validating-...

Awesome project though! I've used some of your samples in past projects

[maxloh]

Will you open source the backend code behind embed.ihateregex.io too?

Also, it would be great if you add a license for the project, like the MIT license which is adopted by many frond end/JavaScript projects.

[Luka Vidaković]

It was nice to read about your success story! Pretty useful product too. Congrats and keep up the good work :)

[Geon George]

Thank you Luka

[Leon Lafayette]

I like it!

Any more open source projects in the pipeline?

[Geon George]

Thank you!
I'd like to port that visualizer to canvas, giving it features like zoom, pan and stuff like google maps

[Konstantin]

Great job!

[Geon George]

Thank you :)

[Mohammed J Hossain]

Hey, that's a cool project there! Love the idea and execution man!

[Geon George]

Thank you, Mohammed :)

[Eswari Jayakumar]

Great !!

[Mike Talbot ⭐]

It's just a brilliant thing.

[Geon George]

Thank you :)

[Evan Plaice]

Nice 👏👏👏

[Geon George]

Thank you Evan

[Miguelángel Cabrera]

Congrats

[Geon George]

Thank you :)

[Ben Halpern]

Congrats

[Geon George]

Thank you Ben :)

[Pedro Couto]

Awesome work!

I've bookmarked it, cause I got the same problem as well!

Thanks a lot 😉

[Geon George]

Haha thank you Pedro :)

[Ankur V]

Congrats.
Thanks it very helpfull

[Keff]

Wow, I remember trying it when you launched, I knew it would boom at some point, so congrats. It's a great tool, I forgot about it, but will be saving it for future use!

[Geon George]

Thank you mate :D