9 years maintaining a sorta-popular open-source package: lessons learned | Hacker News Reader

9 years maintaining a sorta-popular open-source package: lessons learned

evanhahn.com

72 pointsheadalgorithm13 comments

"...a sorta-popular JavaScript package. I say “sorta” because it’s used by lots of people, but it’s not pervasive. It had 105 million downloads in 2022."

Is there any standard of popularity where 100 million+ downloads in a year is only "sorta" popular?

I think GitHub stars tell much more about the popularity. NPM download count prefers dependencies like lodash.

90% of my github stars are projects which I skimmed over and thought looked cool and I might download one day.

Ditto. I use them to (hopefully) send good vibes the the creator / maintainer - you never know, they may need the tiny endorphin hit!

Which means it is a project you should some basic level of interest in. A download might be a dependency of a dependency of a dependency you don't really care about and actually would like to get rid of ...

Indeed. "13% as popular as React". Sheesh.

It might just be a humblebrag

I think companies don't set up local caches. So all those million downloads could just be a few companies running tests on every commit.

Well, I didn't know about Helmet.js, but I've seen React mentioned many times on HN.

Putting examples in the docs to avoid expanding the library is an excellent compromise!

Agreed, this is really smart. I imagine (hope!) it also cuts down on recurring feature requests as it allows you to open up the realm of possibility for using the library in the users head - instead of needing to program in every use case, you introduce someone to serving themselves.

> Without these optimizations, the package would be about 20 kilobytes larger [...] That saved about 2 terabytes of bandwidth in 2022

Ok, but since companies don't set up local caches, it seems pointless to me to stress about saving bandwidth. They don't seem to pay any attention to it.

> sorta-popular

> It had 105 million downloads in 2022

Oof, that stings. My most popular library has 11 million downloads total, over the last 10+ years. I thought it was “pretty-popular”

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