What a Thousand Stars Feels Like
Incredible, briefly. Then the issues started. Real bugs from real users in configurations I hadn't considered. Feature requests that were reasonable individually but collectively amounted to a second job. Questions in the discussion tab. PRs that needed review from contributors I'd never spoken to who had different ideas about what the project should be.
I hadn't planned for any of this. I'd built a tool for my own use and shared it. The expectation of maintenance wasn't something I'd signed up for — but it was the expectation I'd created the moment I made it public and people built on it.
What I Learned About Why I Build
The moment that clarified things: I was debugging a user's issue in a configuration I'd never used and didn't care about. An hour in, I realised I was working for free on a problem that had no meaning to me, for a feature that didn't improve the project in a direction I valued, because I felt obligated to people who had starred the repo.
I learned something important: I build because I enjoy building and solving problems I care about. Stars are not a goal. Adoption is not a goal. The project that gives me those things is the one I should keep building. Everything else is noise, and it's okay to say so.
Key takeaways
- Public open-source creates implicit maintenance expectations — add a clear MAINTENANCE.md stating what you will and won't maintain before your project grows
- Stars measure reach, not value — a project you care about and maintain with ten stars is worth more to you than a project you abandon with a thousand
- It's acceptable to archive a project — a clear archived notice is better for users than an unmaintained repo that looks active
Conclusion
I don't regret the project. I regret the guilt spiral that followed. The right outcome was archiving with a clear README — which I eventually did. The lesson: build for reasons you can sustain, and be honest about those reasons before you share the work publicly.
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Vivek Kumar Singh
Technical Expert · Full Stack Cloud Engineer · Tokyo, Japan
