Hi :D
Today I want to tell you a story of mine, which caused me some serious questions.
The lazy geek
My story started about a month ago, someone asked me : " Hey! Can you write me a Telegram bot with this features ? ", I said " Yes! just give me a week "
The next week was the week of learn & search. I learned how to write a simple bot in my language (PHP), learned some new concepts in PHP, and the most important part, I searched for some libraries and packages written in PHP for developing a bot in Telegram. I found some, I looked into their instructions and documents, and I started to think : " These guys made it so complex, I don't get it at all! ". I'm a bit lazy to, so I decided :
I'm gonna make a library for this job which I understand better and looks simpler
Making Frankenstein monster
I started my (very-first open-source) package, Phelegram!
I was so excited at first. I learned so much more about Github, Git, Making good READMEs for my package, Licenses, new things about PHP, Software engineering ideas, design patterns, and more! I made Phelegram piece by piece, added new tags week by week, and committed new changes and bug fixes day by day. I showed it to a friend and he sayed : " Man! This is amazing! It looks like a real-world package! "
It was a good time. I learned a lot, felt the real success that pro programmers talk about when they achieve victory, and gained self-confidence.
Unill...
Questions made Disappointment !?
I faced some serious bugs, that would make me change the whole code, and it was not easy. While i was thinking for major changes in code, I faced a weird question: " Why am I doing this ? "
I made the bot for my friend weeks before this question, and I didn't have another project to do with this.
My project was much better and bigger. BUT I couldn't answer the question because I got 2 bad reasons to stop the project:
- It was taking most of my time, Although my time was free, but developing speed was too slow, and it didn't lead to any successes. This was hurting me.
- The worse reason: MY PACKAGE DIDN'T HAVE ANYTHING BETTER THAN OTHER ONES! I started this project to make something better and easy to use. but at this point, I looked at my project, and I said to myself: >" It's far behind the other ones, Nobody has a reason to leave the other packages and use mine :( "
- It was limited, means that Telegram bot's have a limited features and I was at the start while others were far beyond the end.
Cutting the tree
Two days ago, I stopped the project for the reasons I said. I really liked it, and i wonder _Where do others get their ideas and motivation for their open-source project ? _
That question got my attention and I thought it's a good topic to discuss with others who are better than me and done some open-source projects. Where's better than dev community :D
I'll be pleased if you answer my question or share your ideas with me, and help me to get another idea for another project, or a reason to resume Phelegram :D
Thanks for reading this post! And sorry if I'm not good at english :)
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