OT: How did the repo get 5000 stars in a few days?

[dandv]

ZeroClipboard lead dev @JamesMGreene said:

Your repo has rocketed from 0 to almost as many stars (~4500) as ZeroClipboard's (~5000) in a period of mere days. Quite an impressive feat, IMHO. 👏

@zenorocha, how did the repo achieve this impressive feat?

[lipis]

After finding water on Mars.. that was the only thing that was missing from the humanity.. 👽

[stan]

Hacker News maybe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10301881

[imom39a]

Came here from Hacker news (y)

[mavrick]

+1 Hacker news

[zenorocha]

It has nothing to do with Hacker News. Here are few different factors that contributed to that:

• Experience: I've been working with open source for a while now. I gave more than 70 talks and built many projects over the last years. There was a LOT of hard work involved and lessons learned along the way.
• Credibility: Because of all those things I've done, lots of people started to follow me not only on GitHub (~3k) but also on Twitter (~20k). I try to offer as much value as I can for those followers every day. That translates to a broader reach whenever I need to share something I've built.
• Docs & demos: 99% of developers complain that nobody cares about their code on GitHub. How you expect people to use something if you don't teach them? My advice is that you need to spend more time writing and improving your documentation than writing code.
• Timing: On September 1, I read this article about Mozilla starting to support execCommand. At that article they said "Firefox 41, which is currently in Beta, and slated to move to release in mid-September". I realized that was the missing part for this API to be adopted broadly. I wrote clipboard.js in a private repo and waited until Firefox 41 was released.
• Working is not enough: Most developers just make things work and that's it. I spent a good amount of time trying to make this library smaller, trying to make the public API easier, and refactoring the source code for better readability.
• Knowing your audience: Everybody hates Flash and everybody hates bloated frameworks. Everybody loves a simple API and everybody loves GitHub's copy to clipboard. If you don't know your audience, you don't know how to create something they'll like.

That's not everything, but I hope it encourage folks to realize it's not just about coding.

[stan]

👍

[addyosmani]

❤️

[ankurdebnath]

Awesome

[ebonet-zz]

Came from hacker news (it was featured in their newsletter), but have seen on FB as well. And yes, the repo is very well structured for collaboration.

[mavrick]

It has nothing to do with Hacker News.

It has a little bit to do with it, but still; great work on the bullet points.

[tpiros]

👍

[mayankcpdixit]

🆒

[victorperin]

👍

[elrumordelaluz]

👍 👍

[jaydson]

👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏
That's my boy!

[robsongajunior]

Plim plim, next level.

[FagnerMartinsBrack]

It seems that hacker news played a major role here. Anyway congratulations xD

[JamesMGreene]

I'm sure there will be another upshot today as it received the #1 spot in this week's JavaScript Weekly email newsletter.

[FagnerMartinsBrack]

Can anybody confirm if given the speed it reached 5k this is a github record? Just curious.

[elrumordelaluz]

@FagnerMartinsBrack https://github.com/stars?direction=desc&sort=stars is in the top 10

[LucasArruda]

👍

[ghost]

👍

[caiocutrim]

Nice answer

[Xhamps]

👍
Work hard, one day anyone will say you was lucky..

[franklinjavier]

@Xhamps tell me about it! hahaha

@zenorocha zenando!

[soapdog]

I feel a disturbance in the force every time Zeno releases new stuff as if a million developers had their wishes granted...

[felipepucinelli]

Great answer.

[MateusZitelli]

👍

[arturparkhisenko]

🙏 for all dev's who will do all with passion like @zenorocha

[mihdan]

👍

[reinaldorauch]

👍

[ghost]

Awesome @zenorocha 👏 👍

[petabyte]

@zenorocha Are any plans to use <div contenteditable=true instead of a text area so that the formatting in clipboard is preserved ?

[zenorocha]

Hey @petabyte,

I haven't thought about that. Could you submit a PR?

[danilovaz]

Vai @zenorocha ❤️ 😄

[lipis]

10K: http://githubstats.lip.is/zenorocha :)

[duyet]

👍

[cristicVictory]

great~~~

[kimorkim]

👍

[jbruni]

The coolest thing is that this issue is intentionally kept open, while people out there are willing to close all issues! 😄 Viva Brazil 🇧🇷

[Heier2013]

Come from china, via oschina.
It's awesome,may can help me deal with many problems！

[wlwr]

👍

[nelsonkuang]

👍

[Ruffio]

@dandv I think that this 'issue' can be closed... ;-)

[381510688]

牛逼啦

[carpii]

@zenorocha Great lib, and I admire your dedication. Thanks!

I've been using it for a while, but still had some parts of my site using ZeroClip (Flash based.. ugh).

[jacobrreed]

In what way is this an issue? lol

[dandv]

@jacobrreed: GitHub issues are a convenient way to communicate publicly with the author(s) of a repo. They don't have to be "problems". I've creating issues congratulating maintainers for a job well done etc.