I get many stars on my last project but no issues or PR. It feels quite lonely and, more importantly, I can't know if my work is going in a good direction.
I recommend adding telemetry to your project for this (and I know a lot of people feel strongly about this, so I'll add: with a very easy way of disabling it).
In OctoSQL[0] I'm literally just sending JSON files with coarse information about 1. invocations of the CLI, 2. features used in these invocations, to a VM on DigitalOcean (with a 10-line server receiving them and writing to a JSON file - which I can then process using OctoSQL itself).
Thanks to this I knew that until recently most of what I had were stars, not actual usage, and could also see how the big rewrite I released in January (and the following updates) made a lot of people start actually using it since. Very nice feeling :)
All telemetry logic in OctoSQL is actually contained in a single short file[1].
PS: Keep in mind that https requests take a long time, as they need to do a few roundtrips for the TLS handshake. Don't do that on every invocation if you have latency-sensitive invocations. I.e. in OctoSQL I'm only sending aggregated telemetry data every 10 invocations (as well as on the very first one).
You may want to consider mentioning it in the README.md as well and alongside any example/default configuration you generate indicating the default state and setting to disable it, especially if it's only output the first time it writes the telemetry history.
Is there an established way that people advertise their open source projects to developers for help? I know that GitHub has exploration features but when I last used them it felt like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Not that I know of. Especially for C. I resorted to re-post to reddit when I reach a subjective milestone but the returns are slim. Also I hear people may dislike such an auto-promoting endeavour...
First time I posted an early naive version of my string lib, the thread became a deluge of 500+ reactions and constructive advice. Subsequent submissions with a much better work got me depressed.
In OctoSQL[0] I'm literally just sending JSON files with coarse information about 1. invocations of the CLI, 2. features used in these invocations, to a VM on DigitalOcean (with a 10-line server receiving them and writing to a JSON file - which I can then process using OctoSQL itself).
Thanks to this I knew that until recently most of what I had were stars, not actual usage, and could also see how the big rewrite I released in January (and the following updates) made a lot of people start actually using it since. Very nice feeling :)
All telemetry logic in OctoSQL is actually contained in a single short file[1].
PS: Keep in mind that https requests take a long time, as they need to do a few roundtrips for the TLS handshake. Don't do that on every invocation if you have latency-sensitive invocations. I.e. in OctoSQL I'm only sending aggregated telemetry data every 10 invocations (as well as on the very first one).
[0]:https://github.com/cube2222/octosql
[1]:https://github.com/cube2222/octosql/blob/main/telemetry/tele...