I've made something that might be useful to the community. Now what?
- by Chris McCall
If the specifics are important, I made a cruisecontrol.net publisher plugin that notifies a series of phone numbers via voice, announcing the current state of the build. It uses Twilio to do so.
I'd like to avoid getting hung up on the specifics of what it is I've made, as I have this question a lot, with a number of little hobby one-offs. What's the state of the art as far as making my hobby output available to the world at large?
There seem to be a lot of options for open-source project hosting, community features, and what role to take in all of this. It's a little bewildering. What I'm looking for is to put this out into the wild for free and basically take a hands-off approach from there. Is that realistic? Which project hosting service can I use for free to allow developers to at least download the code, report issues and collaborate with each other to improve the product?
What snags have you run into that could make me regret this decision? I'm interested in war stories, advice and guidance on making this little product available to the community where it can be used.