What Nobody Told Me About Maintaining an Open Source Project

I am a solo learner. I started coding last year with the help of AI and sometimes without any tutorials or courses.

At first, I thought this journey would be easier. But soon I realized something important — no AI or tool can fully solve the real problems I was facing as a developer.

I used AI a lot. It explained things with confidence and even provided code.

But when I ran that code in my terminal, many times it didn’t work.

That’s when I understood something important: AI can guide, but it cannot replace understanding.

After facing these issues, I changed my way of learning.

Instead of blindly trusting AI, I started:

• Finding real open-source projects
  


• Studying how they were built
  


• Listing important topics from those projects
  


• Reading documentation carefully
  


• Asking AI to explain specific lines of code

This helped me understand real-world code better.

From this learning journey, I realized something:

I should also build my own open-source projects.

At first, I believed that creating a powerful project could automatically bring attention and users.

But I was wrong.

I made a mistake — I was not active on any platform.

I was just coding inside VS Code, without communication or sharing my work anywhere.

Then I realized:

Being a developer is not only about coding. Visibility and communication are also important.

After that realization, I started being active on platforms like Dev.to, LinkedIn, and other developer communities.

I started posting my work and sharing my progress.

Even though I didn’t get many comments, I started getting reactions and engagement. That small feedback gave me motivation.

From this journey, I learned something important:

Open source is not only about code. It is about helping other developers, sharing knowledge, and being consistent and visible.

A developer should not only code silently but also participate in the community.

Now I understand that coding is only one part of being a developer. Community, communication, and consistency are equally important.

And I will continue building open source projects while staying active in developer platforms.