The responsibilities of an open-source developer

The proudest moment anybody initiating an open-source project can experience is when that project finally gains the momentum to make a difference within the community it targets. When my colleague Martin and I published the first release of Fluent Assertions on CodePlex in 2011 (yeah, those were the days), not even in our wildest dreams we expected that by 2016 our NuGet package would have been downloaded that much. Next to that, almost every week, somebody posts a blog post about our little .NET assertion library. And if you scan nugetmusthaves.com, you’ll find 54 packages relying on Fluent Assertions. It supports all current .NET versions and platforms including Xamarin (by Oren Novotny). And even the .NET Core Lab team is using it, which is why we support CoreCLR, .NET Native and .NET 4.6 since it earliest betas.

But with that popularity comes great responsibility…

Rather than working on the next killer feature or API, you’ll be spending a lot of your private time answering questions on GitHub, Gitter, StackOverflow or email. And if you do that, stay friendly and constructive. Thank them for taken the time to file an issue, and do that in a timely fashion. Nothing is more annoying for somebody that uses your library, runs into an issue he or she can’t resolve, takes the time to post about it and doesn’t get a response in weeks. That sure is a recipe for losing some fans quickly. Even if you believe they’ve made the mistake and everything is fine with your library, take the time to explain your…