How to make your open source project popular

At Upstream 2024,
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This talk summarizes my 15 years making open source tools. Some of them have become popular (PostCSS, Autoprefixer, and Nano ID have more than 60M downloads per month) but most projects did not (but their fails taught me more than the successful projects).

The talk is not about the dark patterns, but about the things which many maintainers forget: about the users and the fact, that users don’t have enough time:

— Why open source dream is a lie?
— What are good and bad reasons to create an open source project?
— How to write docs readable (even for users who have a hard-working day)?
— What to do if you are not a native English speaker?
— How to deal with hate?
— A few tricks to reduce burnout a little.

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Irina Nazarova CEO at Evil Martians

Evil Martians transform growth-stage startups into unicorns, build developer tools, and create open source products. Hire us to design and build your product