What I learned from Speaking with Taylor Otwell and How its Changing Masonite

#python #laravel #webframework #laracon

Introduction

I got the awesome opportunity to talk to Taylor Otwell, the creator of Laravel, for a few minutes at Laracon 2019. I knew I only wanted to take a few minutes of his time so I had to think of 1 solid question to ask him.

So here's the question I asked him:

Masonite is currently at over 1000 stars. When Laravel was at 1000 stars, what's something you did to really get it to the next level?

Taylor's Response

What Taylor said was pretty straight forward and made a lot of sense:

He said:

Video tutorials, documentation and blog posts. The easier it is to learn, the more people will use it.

Reflection

Now, this might be obvious to you but this was sort of profound to me. I feel like its something I always sort of knew but it was one of those things where simply hearing it out loud makes it make more sense than saying it to yourself.

The interesting part there is:

The easier it is to learn, the more people will use it

There is something implicit in that sentence right there. The goals I have been developing towards have been creating a better framework than all of its competitors.

But I think the real goal here is just as Taylor said, "The easier it is to learn, the more people will use it."

See, things don't have to be better for people to necessarily use it. It needs to be easy to learn. You need to be able to start development and stay started.

Think of the best package having no documentation at all vs a less good package with amazing documentation. Which one do you think more people will use?

Future Goals

So instead of working on a whole bunch of new features, I will be taking the next few months and working on ways to make Masonite easier to learn. Masonite will continue to have feature releases of course but less often. I will let the community be the leaders of the next few releases and take more of a BDFL approach by doing reviews and general pop-ins on PR's.

Instead of coding in my free time, I will be working on things that make Masonite easier to learn. Instead of trying to get new features to be the driver of new users. I will focus on making Masonite the easiest Python web framework to learn and, according to Taylor, that will be the driver of new users.

This will entail things like:

Even more documentation
More video tutorials
More blog posts
More code snippets
More How-tos.
Build a site where I can store all these video tutorials.

I think taking the next few months going with this approach will allow Masonite to take off pretty well.

Top comments (5)

O ji nwayo e je • Jan 12 '23

@josephmancuso how did this pan out 3 years down the line? I hope you found something else that worked for you cuz I'm neither a fan of creating or watching video content. It seems unfair to me that after all the painstaking work that goes into oss, the creator still has to do all this PR and devrel before the community can consider rewarding him with usage and traction

Camilo • Jul 31 '19

It's important for a technology to have a vision that is future proof and can be passed on to newcomers. Being the #1 in a niche is a good goal, but hard to maintain over time. The goal of having one of the best documentations and ease of learning is a more sustainable and attainable goal in my opinion. :)