My 2024 Hacktoberfest Maintainer Experience: Building and Growing ImagePro
This is a submission for the 2024 Hacktoberfest Writing Challenge: Maintainer Experience
Hey there, I’m Jackson Kasi 🙂👋, and I’m excited to share my journey as a maintainer during this year’s Hacktoberfest. My project, ImagePro, a Figma plugin, started as a fun experiment but grew into something much bigger, with a dedicated team and meaningful contributions from the open-source community 🚀.
💪 My Team:
The Birth of ImagePro
Initially, ImagePro was a small project aimed at helping developers and designers export their assets from Figma in various formats like PNG, JPG, WEBP, SVG, and PDF. I noticed that many plugins out there were either too expensive or lacked features like password protection for PDFs, color mode conversion, or merging multiple PDFs. So, I thought, why not build something free and open-source? 🎯
As a developer with limited design experience, my main focus was on the technical side—ensuring that the plugin was feature-rich, efficient, and easy to use. But soon enough, I realized that the user interface needed serious improvement to make it truly user-friendly 🤯.
From Solo to a Team Effort 💪
At first, I was the sole maintainer, juggling development, testing, and (attempting) UI/UX improvements. Realizing I needed help, I reached out to my coworker colleague Aswin to assist with the design side. He agreed, and while balancing his full-time job, he contributed his free time to making the plugin more user-friendly 🎨.
Despite our efforts, we still needed more design expertise.
So, I turned to the online community, asking in Discord, Slack channels, forums, and LinkedIn for UI/UX contributions. For a long time, I received no responses.
But I didn’t lose hope. Persistence paid off when I discovered Open Source Design, a community dedicated to connecting open-source projects with designers 🧑🎨.
I received many responses from Open Source Design; most contributors eventually left the project.💔
I finally found Sharvari Suresh, who stayed on and has been instrumental in improving the user experience of ImagePro 🌟.
With Aswin, Sharvari, and myself, we’ve built a small, but passionate, team that continues to work on the plugin in our free time.
The Pinata Cloud Integration 🎉
As part of the Pinata Challenge, we integrated Pinata Cloud into ImagePro, making file uploads easier and more secure 🔐. Now users can export their assets and upload them directly to Pinata Cloud, where they can manage, search, and download their files without hassle 🛠️.
This integration added a new layer of functionality to the plugin, helping it stand out in the Figma ecosystem 🌍. It was a great learning experience for me as a maintainer, as I balanced managing contributions and keeping the core functionality aligned with the community's needs.
The Highs and Lows of Maintaining 🎢
Being a maintainer during Hacktoberfest is an intense but rewarding experience. On the positive side, I saw firsthand how an open-source project can grow through community contributions ✨. I also learned the importance of clear communication—especially when working with contributors across different time zones and skill levels 🌍.
On the downside, it can be challenging to balance everything, especially when contributions slow down or when certain tasks (like improving the UI) feel out of my personal expertise 🛑. But having a team to lean on makes a big difference. We share the workload, brainstorm solutions, and encourage each other 🤝.
Looking Ahead 🔮
We’re far from done with ImagePro. Our next steps include adding AI-driven image features 🤖, exploring SaaS opportunities, and continuing to refine the plugin. While maintaining a project isn’t easy, I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished so far and excited about where we’re headed 🚀.
Hacktoberfest was a fantastic opportunity for us to reflect on our progress and engage with the open-source community 💡. As a maintainer, it’s taught me the importance of collaboration, perseverance, and adaptability.
Here’s to many more contributions, challenges, and growth in the future. And for anyone considering open-source work—just go for it! You never know where it’ll take you! 🌟
Thanks to my amazing team, Aswin & Sharvari Suresh, for sticking with me on this journey and helping make ImagePro a success! 🙌
You can try ImagePro on Figma here: 👉 ImagePro on Figma
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