Liyas ThomasHoppscotch is an open source API development ecosystem.
Since the initial commit (~2 years ago), Hoppscotch has evolved from being an open source side project to an enterprise developer tool.
Hoppscotch is celebrating the milestone of reaching 30,000 GitHub Stars.
This is an achievement of our whole community. Thank you for each contribution, love, and all the commitments that you made to improve Hoppscotch. We are lucky to build this open-source project with you.
Many people ask me why it got so popular. Here's my answer.
Most developers have side projects. That’s how we try out new things or make something that we miss on the market or in our dev stack. But most side projects end up unfinished and never actually see the light of day. And even if a developer builds up the courage to show his work to the public, he quickly finds out that just publishing a repository doesn’t bring the masses to his doorstep.
When I set out to create Hoppscotch, of course, I haven’t had the faintest idea if anyone else would be interested in it. But I was mainly scratching my own itch — I knew how to make a web app and I hoped I’d build something that would serve my needs much better than existing tools on the market. That should be your primary motivator — not to chase stars, likes, and other popular content, but to create something for yourself that will make your job easier. There’s a chance you will not be the only one that will find it useful.
I’d like to share with you what I did to make sure that the project doesn’t end up in the dustbin of history. I will concentrate on open source software, but the following advice may as well apply to any creative endeavor.
1. Build a solution
Look around - think about the tools and products you use every day and the underlying problems they solve.
Instead of identifying a solution first, the initial step is to identify the problem. The key here is to be very specific about the problem you are identifying.
- Once you’ve identified the problem, the next step is to ideate possible solutions, and they don’t have to necessarily be technical solutions.
- Then, from those proposed solutions, create prototypes and begin to test each one.
- Continue testing and refining the prototypes until you have enough validation to move full-steam ahead with the one that is working.
Read more in my article: Solve your own problem, everything else will follow.
2. Build in public
Document your journey of building the project. Engage with your users in public forums like dev.to. Write blogs and articles, talk to your audience, share your milestones, ask for help, get feedback and iterate over the product.
3. Build for public
Ship early, ship often. Release the first version as soon as it’s useful. Don’t wait for it to be perfect. For inspiration, here's the initial public MVP release of Hoppscotch. You don’t have to be satisfied with it. You’ll never be. But you should be eager for some feedback.
When you add a useful feature to your project, you don’t have to wait for anything to release it or deploy it. It just has to work. The feedback loop with inputs from other people will tell you whether what you’re building makes sense or whether you should take it in other directions. It’s good to get that feedback as soon as possible.
Roadmap
Me and Andrew Bastin having been building Hoppscotch in public for the past ~2 years. Today is the starting point of many exciting moves and features that will come to Hoppscotch from the very beginning of next month.
We started to work on different features among which are the capability for teams to collaborate in real-time, workspaces, and some others you'll hear of soon. As always, we are grounding our work on the multiple insights that our users gave us and we are more grateful than ever to have such a committed community.
Conclusion
To put it in a nutshell, we'll work on our main focus and priority: making our users happy with new features and improving Hoppscotch as much as we can do.
Contact: liyas@hoppscotch.io
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