Coded a Great Little Project? Share It (Like Maybe.Me) and – Don’t Forget It!
The problem with creating a quick and “dirty” project often ends up with the code still stuck on your computer (fine, you use a ‘cloud’ code editor) instead of being shared online. While interesting development projects might end up becoming a fast growing startup ready for TechCrunch Disrupt (where Spark.Me sends some of the best startups in the world), most of the time they are forgotten even by their creators. Lets kick that habit. Lets share the small projects and hacks we build with the world. You never know – maybe they gain traction!
One such example is Maybe.Me, a very small – tiny even – web application that lets you create shortcodes for your Facebook profile or page. It’s quite simple: You go to Maybe.Me and log in with your Facebook account, which will automatically give you a 5-character shortcode. You can then enter your (or somebody else’s – which makes more sense) shortcode into Maybe.Me and it will redirect you to their Facebook page.
Now, I know what you’re thinking – you can do that with most URL shorteners – even getting a branded version of the URL for less than $50 that Maybe.Me advertises its custom URL service. Your first reaction will then be: Why do I even care about Maybe.Me?
The reason is simple. There’s a good chance that someone will actually want to launch or create a service that can beat the various URL shorteners of the world – and they might acquire or hire the authors of Maybe.Me to help them do that. That wouldn’t be possible if they stuck the code on their desktop or – even worse – put it in the trash bin.
Why Not Just Share Your ‘Hacks’ on Public Repositories
You can, and should definitely consider, sharing projects on public repositories such as Github, but do have in mind that in that case they will be accessible just to people that know how to browse, use and deploy them. “Normal” users will be intimidated to the even most user friendly repository. All the code and projects will look the same. And you might not want to share your code, just the project.
That’s why Maybe.Me, while maybe not being the most impressive bit of web application wizardry out there – might find their audience easier than the most complex project that all your developer friends are liking – and forking.
So What to Do (With That Hack)?
You have a couple of simple options:
1. Share it on your personal website or portfolio. If you’re developing web or mobile apps there’s a fair chance that you’ve built a small personal website in the past to show off your skills. Well, at least ‘hardcode’ a piece of it to showcase your smaller projects, such as the code you were planning to delete and that someone could learn from at least!
2. Share the code on a public repository that the rest of the community can look at, learn from, fork or outright use. You might have spent just a couple of minutes on it – but for someone else it might be the 11 lines of code they’ve been looking for for months…
3. Create a mini placeholder website or a live version of the app like Maybe.Me did. It might not win any awards or get acquired by Google, but someone could open it up and use it as an example of a good way to share your code. So meta 😉 It’s easy enough finding various free and paid landing page themes and registering a cool domain name for your sweet little project. You don’t have to share the code – just the project!
You never know what someone could do with the projects you though was irrelevant – and that’s the thing we love about the Internet. It’s a world of possibilities and a network of people that – when they find something interesting – might look at your code from a perspective you never could. So Maybe (.Me), it just makes sense to share your sweet code projects – today!
Go on, share – I’ll wait… 🙂
