Differentiate your gem

Posted by Anton Katunin on 14 September 2014
Tags: code, ideas

Are you tired of seeing yet another project on github while there are ten others which do exactly the same thing? In this post I suggest we start to diffirentiate our projects.

Projects like Ruby Toolbox make developers life much easiers by categorising gems and what's more important providing popularity information. It is important because developer can make make his own decision why one gem is better than other one.

The first question I'm looking answer for in such situation is how this gem or project on github is different from another one, almost identical as it seems at first.

I believe every single library should have the first two sections in its readme file:

  • What is it? And how can it make my life better?
  • How is it different from competitor projects?

So when you think your new project is going to change the world and there are none like it in existance. You can save yourself some time and delete it after initial commit.

Save time for your fellow developers, be honest and tell why we should and shouldn't use your library.


Read next:

Comparison in Ruby

at BrisRuby meetup