“How does it feel to trend in HackerNews?”
There was this question in HackerNews a few weeks ago. Honestly, it’s a trivial question and some of the answers are straightforward. It’s an interesting question to take on in my part, since I did get to the front page with an open-source project of mine. Interesting enough that I wanted to write about it. It’s true that you get to pick-up new Twitter followers, emails and comments who provide insight on how to make things better.
CSS3 Microsoft-Modern Buttons: A little background
3 months ago, I had a project that I needed to rapidly prototype. They wanted to make it feel like Windows-8. I searched high and low for a metro-like css framework. I found several but none were really built to be simple enough for prototyping: they’re too over the top.
So I took 2 hours researching designs, learning Windows 8 color hues and looking for neat button implementations. After that, I quickly polished a set of metro-buttons based on some of the things I researched. My stakeholders were happy, and I was happy.
Thinking some people might need it as well I pushed it to github. As always, I took another hour to do a couple of things before pushing:
Straight-forward documentation. - I think a lot of open-source projects lack this. I keep reminding myself that the target audience are developers, so it needs good examples and explanation on how the buttons generally worked and behaved. No matter how cool we think our project is, if no one else can use it for their need, no one else know how it works or behaves, or no one even knows where to begin - then the project is a little hard to get onboard with since you’re basically inviting them: “Hey, dive into the code and swim around aimlessly”.
Analytics and social buttons - Hooked it up with Google Analytics, social buttons and see how people behaved with the site. Again, I needed to know if people actually found the documentation readable and worthy enough to be shared.
It got good responses, thanked some people and companies for certain parts of the project via twitter. A lot of developers from France viewed the documentation site and someone linked it to HackerNews.
People enjoyed the buttons and for the past 3 months I average 60+ unique visits each day.
Trending.. generally speaking
Come 3 months since, I found a few issues about the buttons and was actually in need of using them again.
Spent 1 ½ hours benchmarking designs, adding form elements, fixing issues, repainting buttons, researching implementations and shaving off a few unwanted KB’s from the original buttons file. The buttons got a little better in a sense for my personal need.
I figured it wasn’t that perfect, but I decided to push it to github anyway since people could use an update from what I’ve released 3 months ago. This time around I figured the documentation needed better typgoraphy for readability and less prose on the front page to simplify and directly convey the message of what it is to developers that might need it. I also fixed a few things about the documentation since people constantly drop me emails about certain how-to’s and for troubleshooting.
So I posted it in HackerNews, thanked some people and companies for certain parts of the project via twitter, answered a couple of early comments in hackernews and left my house to have dinner with my fiance and her friends.
The morning after, I was surprised to see the documentation site hitting 10k unique pageviews, and more than 3k on the download button. So I checked it out on HackerNews and Github - the buttons were trending.
Currently, it’s been a few days and it’s still trending on Github, averaging 2-4k unique pageviews a day, and getting a flow of congratulations, comments, tweets, emails and the occasional weird responses.
It’s quite flattering that some people think Microsoft did these buttons.
You haven’t answered the question
So how does it feel to trend in hackernews?
Great!
Is the feeling of euphoria coming from creating something that a lot of people saw and went “oooohhh ahhh” because it was nice and shiny? Nope :) the feeling actually comes from doing what matters most: building things that people actually use so that they can achieve their goals in making their world better through software.
Creating things. Creating value. That is what matters most.
So no matter what project you’re doing, and no matter what language/tools/framework you’re using, if that keeps creating value for people - then that’s worth a lot