What's the best way to contribute, advertise and have people
get interested in libraries that I write?
Seasoned folks approving it
Beginners using i, making Arduino yet more approachable
I come from the dark corporate world of trade secrets so I have
yet to understand the dynamics of public domain contributions.
So far I figure I should start with:
Push the code to git
Post here about the library
Make a wordpress journal
However online contributions are often shouting at a wall. There's just
too many people shouting at the same time, and no way of knowing
who's got something interesting to listen to.
So all in all that does not guarantee anyone will ever bother looking
at the code to try it out and curate it. I think seasoned contributors
would have to put a seal of approval "this actually makes sense"
for folks to actually use the code.
For many sensors and such, I notice we're still stuck having to generate
some management code, or cobble solutions form code examples
that are not always robust or do not fully implement the support needed
to make the sensor reliable, causing a lot of guess work. Also lots of
programmers don't grok how compilers interpret code and don't generate
compact code that optimizes well.
Since I'm working with some sensors, I'm implementing for myself such
an infrastructure and would find it gratifying to see others interested in
them and using them.
Do everyone a favour and make it clear in your documentation what Arduino features each library uses.
At the moment it is common to find conflicts between libraries but difficult to figure out why. As the Arduino has few resources it is probably impossible to avoid conflicts so it would be a great help if your libraries clearly list the resources they use.
It would also be a good idea if you ensure your libraries work with the SoftwareSerial and Servo libraries which are used regularly (and which actually conflict with each other).
And you could also start a useful new trend by writing comprehensive documentation - not just a few examples.
Personally I detest Github because they use pale grey text that I find very difficult to read.
Right now I've had some compatibility issues with the Wire library and it's bit-bang
version or AtTiny85, so I learned a bit there.
I like to put basic doxygen style comments in my code,and yes, I like my code to be clear
and the examples obvious.
The trend I've developed is to use C++ templated classes for constant parameters, like
pins so in fact you can implement a class, and instantiate a few objects that will work for most,
but with the option to ignore them (they compile out if unused) and declare some with your
own parameters. This seems to work better to optimize constants than declaring consts, and
allows code customization with a one liner.
The end run is a class that has a begin() and a read() as the main accessors, similar to many
of the more useful classes.
I will definitely do that then when I'm out of the woods with my projects and can spend some
time promoting byproduct libraries I've made for myself.
That's great! I look forward to trying this out.
There's not dedicated "library contribution" section in the Arduino forum I suppose.
