DEV Community

🆘 Open sourcing getd.io

TechBos😎 on September 06, 2019

I'm planning to open source getd.io 🚀, a free and online REST API builder that I built weeks back. You can read more about it in this post. Whil...
Read full post
Collapse
 
krusenas profile image
Karolis •

Hi, I was in a similar situation with webhookrelay.com (for a long time client was open source and was considering open sourcing server side). I would suggest just considering whether you will be getting contributions. If not - then it doesn't make much sense open sourcing it :)
Most of the time people won't contribute and it might just make a little bit harder for you to do breaking changes (for example database schema and other things).

Collapse
 
techbos profile image
TechBos😎 getd.io/ - Postman without native apps • • Edited

Thank you for sharing your experience! I just checked out webhookrelay.com. Very interesting!

The reasons I'm considering open-source getd.io are:

  1. I feel all the 'easy' features are complete and now the project is at a critical turning point that it either dies silently, or grows quickly with many yet-to-come new features.
  2. There is no good way to collect feedbacks and I was hoping to open source it, get some more attention, and at the same time gather feedbacks from the community about where it should go next.
  3. Me doesn't scale. I was hoping to publish a roadmap, get people excited, and build this project faster with help from community.

just considering whether you will be getting contributions.

It's a chicken-egg problem :) I don't know if I will be getting contributions. It seems to me the only way to know is to open source it first.
Another signal is that since this post didn't get as many responses as I'd hoped, maybe open sourcing this project is not a good idea :D

Most of the time people won't contribute

True. I also looked at other popular repos, even with thousands of stars. It seems most time contributors would only work on small-scope, simple tasks. E.g., UI tweaks, or quick improvements for usability. It's rare to see people spend time properly contributing an end-to-end feature, which to be fair is difficult to do even for the creator.

Collapse
 
anshsaini profile image
Ansh Saini •

What stack did you use to build this?
I love the idea and would love to contribute!

Collapse
 
techbos profile image
TechBos😎 getd.io/ - Postman without native apps • • Edited
  • Front: react.js + react-router + semantic-ui-react + apollo client + typescript
  • Back: express + passport + node.js + mongoose + apollo server + graphql

Thank you for the support! I will for sure let you know when this goes open.