the open source pit of success

I just published my first public project – generator-pymod. It is a super-simple Yeoman generator that creates a couple of files and a directory in the form of a Python module. As I said, simple. It’s not much to do by hand, but I hate doing things over and over that a script would be better at doing for me, and I hate having to remember minutiae.

So I decided to automate this using Yeoman. I know I could have done this with a simple bash script (actually I did), but I wanted to learn how to put together a very simple generator by actually doing it. The end result is that I learned a thing or two about yeoman, but more importantly my eyes were opened to how easy things like npm make it to publish my first npm package.

It reminded me of Jeff Atwood’s article “Falling into the Pit of Success”. It was just so easy to publish it: why woudn’t I? After the initial push to github it was all of 2 minutes looking at the docs before I was “live” at the npm package registry. A few more minutes and I had it running on Travis continuous integration on travis-ci.org.