Brainstorming about ecosystem, userbases and codebases

[Guillaume Piolat]

On Sunday, 4 February 2024 at 21:29:14 UTC, Elias Batek wrote:
> I’m not here to tell anyone how they should write their code or 
> what they should spend their time with. Neither do I want to 
> imply any authority on judging how other people should spend 
> their time. All I want to say is, if you want to see the 
> ecosystem and user base grow, you should probably look forward 
> to participate in that as well. And write code with an actual 
> user in place (not in mind).

My 2 cents:

- Every user that came to Dplug told me the same story: "The 
examples built.", and they did not for competing frameworks for 
them. The most important thing you can do for user acquisition is 
to check that your examples actually build, in several OS. People 
have a variety of OS and D configurations and it can prevent 
getting to user zero. I see it over and over for every library 
presented on these NG. arsd were a perfect example of how many 
users you can attract if your code build (and even then I had 
trouble with minigui, and didn't use it).

- When "user zero" or "user <n>" wants a bug fixed, and you fix 
them, do not forget to update the DUB git tag and tell them to 
"dub upgrade". Fixing it in ~master doesn't solve their problem, 
right?

- Traditionally people says documentation must be of several 
type: inline doc, per-case idioms, blog post about topic, 
exhaustive reference... I find that the most effective type of 
documentation is of the per-use case idiom. A list of problems 
and their solution, ready to be copy/pasted. People certainly do 
not care about what beautiful abstractions you elaborated, only 
what problems your code can solve for them.

One of the library that does that perfectly well is `serverino`, 
which will go on to explain how to put a reverse-proxy in web 
servers.