History of Apache Storm and Lessons Learned Notes:

Article: http://nathanmarz.com/blog/history-of-apache-storm-and-lessons-learned.html

Notes:
Any successful project requires two things:

1. It solves a useful problem
2. You are able to convince a significant number of people that your project is the best solution to their problem

Make sure that your software is using common language like Java to ensure a very large amount of potential users.

To ensure other non-JVM languages can use it, make sure to define topologies as Thift data structures, and topologies are submitted using a Thrift API. Hence by increasing the use of your software by other languages increases your exposure to larger audience.

There are two ways you can go about releasing open source software. The first is to "go big", build a lot of hype for the project, and then get as much exposure as possible on release. This approach can be risky though, since if the quality isn't there or you mess up the messaging, you will alienate a huge number of people to the project on day one. That could kill any chance the project had to be successful. The second approach is to quietly release the code and let the software slowly gain adoption. This avoids the risks of the first approach, but it has its own risk of people viewing the project as insignificant and ignoring it.

Advantages of releasing your application at a conference:

1. The conference would help with marketing and promotion.
2. You would be presenting to a concentrated group of potential early adopters, who would then blog/tweet/email about it all at once, massively increasing exposure.
3. You could hype my conference session, building anticipation for the project and ensuring that on the day of release, there would be a lot of eyes on the project.

People need to monitor their applications. Hence make sure to build monitoring API or at least log metrics for retrieval via Splunk or ELK.

ALWAYS supply as much of documentation as possible with your software/application. If there is no documentation, then the users don’t know how to use your application or software and hence it would discourage them from using it. Hence always make sure that documentation is extensive and up to date!