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Stories

Few months ago, on HackerNews, I noticed there is one news talking about a desktop application called HipHop. I was curious what it was at the first glimpse, but just after using it, I was becoming one of the maintainers. As you may see, it is an music application written based on node-webkit and can be used on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX.

But sadly, because at the first, HipHop would hide the video and it would break Youtube’s ToS. In this way, HipHop was forced (?) to be taken down. And then after a while, another maintainer helped to move the code out and show the video on the application to avoid breaking ToS, and this brand-new application is called – Atraci.

So yeah, this is just a basic story about Atraci and I am currently active on this project and try to make it better to use. Hope one day this application can compete with the other applications like Spotify.

What I Learned

1. You have to spread your investments out. Remember to share your resources with the others because you may get absent one day with any reason.
2. It takes a lot of efforts to co-work with others.
3. If you want to make your application cross platforms based on node-webkit, you have to make sure you have enough platforms to test with your application.

For note one, you would never know what would happen tomorrow especially in open source. For example, one of our core maintainer has to join the military services for some reasons accidentally and He is the only one who controls the domain name, s3 server and has privileges to add others into Slack. So, after he went to the army, no one can control all of them and the only way to fix this is to make a new one. This would definitely hurt experiences for users and I can’t do anything on this. All I can do is trying to transfer all of them back to Github gh-pages and maintain there. So if possible, please make sure there is always another one who can do the same thing like you.

For note two, because it’s an open source community, you can’t control too much on the skills and their habits. So its takes time to co-work with them. All you can do is trying to make some principles and tools for you like linters or something else. You need machines to help you control these stuffs because you would never know what you missed when writing codes.

For note three, this is kinda annoying too. In order to cross platforms, you rely on node-webkit to help you overcome this shit. But, sadly, there is always some fucking weird problems that you would never know and would happen only on specific platform. Because I only use Mac, so I can’t make sure the application would work on Linux and Windows, this is really scary if you are going to release builds that you have never tested on.

So after a while, I found another maintainer who can take care of Windows and Linux and I would focus on Mac and Linux. This decision really helps and makes the program better.

Some words

Except above notes, there is one more thing I need to share. Always respond quickly and don’t be afraid to make mistakes. In Atraci, there are always bugs coming up and need people to fix. All I can do is respond quickly to make them feel they are noticed, and trust me, this definitely works all the time.

Hope this helps for you guys. Stay tuned with my next post 🙂