⭐ Building cool software projects

Design Goals

it's good to state design goals

• https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/alternatives
  

  Alternatives, Inspiration and Comparisons - FastAPI
  

  very cool comparison page, I really like it
  

Wow, the project homepage has a great dynamic command-line generator that lets you specify what you are trying to do.
This may exist elsewhere, but it's the first time I've seen it and I hope to see it on more projects! https://www.visidata.org/

Try Datasette without installing anything using Glitch
Glitch is a free online tool for building web apps directly from your web browser. You can use Glitch to try out Datasette without needing to install any software on your own computer.

apparently people like specific demos

• like here Comparison to Other Tools - pipx
  

Example interaction: Install pipx with pip: pip install --user pipx

Link to the actual repo: https://github.com/hellojoshuatonga/react-use-fuzzy
As others said, I recommend adding a GitHub pages of a demo or something. Not fun having to spin this up yourself to test what it does/looks like.

Localhost can be tunneled to a public url for mobile testing purposes using ngrok.

need to figure out how to quickly selfhost stuff

Seems that people hate complicated configuration

• $HOME for configs/paths/cache (e.g. XDG-compliant, something like appdirs)
  

[admin]
Controls the availability of the built-in, web-based admin interface.
    Note: The Admin UI is deprecated as of InfluxDB 1.2.
enabled = false
Set to true to enable the admin interface.

Environment variable: INFLUXDB_ADMIN_ENABLED

I guess it's a good pattern?
e.g. split env variable by _ and bind to code

good setting design with system defaults (readonly) and user preferences on the side

+---------+
| emacs   |
|    +------+
+----| mu4e | --> send mail (smtpmail)
     +------+
      |  A
      V  |  ---/ search, view, move mail
+---------+    \
|   mu    |
+---------+
  |    A
  V    |
+---------+
| Maildir |  <--- receive mail (fetchmail,
+---------+                     offlineimap, ...)

characters (e.g. A, V) can be used for drawing

Huginn is nice, when you try to create 'agent' it shows the documentation/examples aside

• use CI
  
• specify how to run tests (usually clear from CI coffig)
  
• specify how to spin up the developer environment (e.g. editable install)
  

That looks really cool.  Note that many users don't know what CFEngine is, so you might want to mention that (then again, maybe users who don't already know what it is don't matter, haha).
Your demo GIF is pretty cool.  You might find this interesting: after recording and tidying up demo GIFs for `helm-org-ql` several times, I wrote a shell script to make it easier.  Using the `gif-screencast` package for Emacs, all I have to do is run the script, make the Emacs window active, and it does the rest.

https://github.com/alphapapa/org-ql/blob/master/images/demo-helm-org-ql.sh

I'm happy to announce the release gif-screencast 1.1!
https://gitlab.com/ambrevar/emacs-gif-screencast

It isn't much, but I know that gif-screencast has had annoying issues for a
while, I figured I'd rather let the community know!

- Fix off-by-one error in frame delay (thanks to /u/alphapapa for this one!)
- Remove "Press ... to stop" message from resulting GIF.
- New `gif-screencast-start-or-stop` command.
- Log the complete command lines of all invokes commands.

Peek does not support this natively. But you could install an external tool like key-mon which is usually included in most distributions, so you can easily install with your package manager. Then start key-mon with key-mon --visible_click. The --visible_click option is for drawing small circles around mouse clicks.

• [2020-04-02] looked at peek for demo automation, and it doesn't quite do the trick
  
  • you can continue/pause recording from the console
    
  • you can't set window id/adjust (granted, you can do it externally via xdotool which is arguably more modular)
    
  • you can't set recording format/path from the console (and even save the video?)
    that made it useless for my purposes
    

A small plugin for obs studio that shows keyboard, mouse and gamepad inputs on stream.
Supports Windows and Linux (64bit, if you need 32bit either compile it yourself or message me)

I think it dumps broken ogv file. There is some jerkiness.
When you convert it to something else with ffmpeg, it's complaining about broken frames and sometimes even segfaults

also it hasn't been updated for a decade, apparently

nice design and summary on this page

GPL (any version)
Bad: doesn’t have the “network protection”: you don’t need to submit changes back to me if you modify the code and run it only as a SaaS.

GNU GPL v1, v2, v3

The following steps are required in order to be able to take advantage of the reduced requirements:
    The LGPL-licensed library must be used as a shared library (dynamically-linked).
    For LGPL v3 only, the user must be able to replace the shared library with a compatible library and have it work (the user must be able to swap out libraries on the device).
    Customers must receive either object files or source code (including any modifications) of the LGPL-licensed library.

If you are the copyright holder, it's up to you how you license your work —I think the only catch is that you can't retrospectively revoke open-source licenses for previous versions, but I think you could easily publish an updated version with a different license, or even license with two different licenses if you wanted to. Also, if others have previously contributed to the project whilst it was under a given license, you will need their permission to relicense it, unless you have a copyright-grant agreement with them (such that they assign copyright to their contributions to you).

https://namewink.com/

The reason is to avoid siloing the changelog on Github. It's fine to also copy it on "Releases" page as well, but make the CHANGELOG.md (or any other plaintext file) the primary source of truth.

• Why didn't I stick with my last idea?
  
• Could I make that idea simpler?
  
• Could I reuse that idea elsewhere?
  
• Why am I not motivated to work on this idea (any more)?
  
• Could I change it around so that I am?
  
• What are people looking for?
  
• What are people NOT looking for?
  
• What ideas are already floating out there, that haven't been popularized, but could be done better?
  
• What ideas are getting too much hype and attention, so that I can filter them out?
  
• Is my idea trivial enough not to scare me?