Ask HN: How do you find developers with same interests, for side projects?
2 comments
You are asking the wrong question: How do they Find you?! Make your projects easy to join and contribute. And do Some marketing. Check e.g. the great book The Art of Community, cc licensed so you can check the pdf on https://www.jonobacon.com/books/artofcommunity/
It's really a tough problem.
What I do when I need a programmer-buddy for a side project — just pitching people, whom I personally know. Of course I need to target exactly those guys who have corresponding skills.
But I don't see any other approach to find reliable partners.
Contributing on GitHub and other platforms is nice, but it's often one way contributions: when you contribute to a project, there are few chances the author will contribute back to one of yours. Of course I'm not asking for the authors of projects I contributed to to contribute back, as it's not something I expect from people or myself. But I would love to know some developers with projects at the same level of popularity as mine, who want/need help and are willing to contribute back, and with who I could discuss, share ideas, plan sprints, etc.
In short: I would like to create a friendly group of developers who share the same interests. For example, for me it would be around CLI tools, but more specifically, CLI tools that help managing repositories, shell libraries (Bash/Zsh), and tools that help improving your comfort/productivity in the terminal.
The question is: how to find them? How do YOU find them, if you do? I don't know any platform serving this purpose. Of course I can just go on GitHub and contact people with projects similar to mine, but it seems a bit random and I think I would spend a lot of time sending emails for small results.