[DSP] Get Noticed! - summary

Today is the last day of Get Noticed! (Daj się poznać) contest in its 2017 edition, so it’s time to write a little summary of it. As a reminder, contest is about developing an open source sideproject and writing on a blog. A minimum was 20 posts during three months, out of which at least half should be related to the project.

General summary

Last year I had a couple of points about the contest in general. I’ll keep it that way this year.

• Too much concentration on the blog, projects suffered. – Because writing two posts per week (on average) requires a lot of effort and it’s the only measure of participant’s performance in the contest, I feel that most of the projects (mine included) were a bit sidetracked. Of course, there are a few that are finished, but majority of contestants I followed have result similar to mine: something done, but far from finishing.
  There is also a second look to it. If you choose project that is too easy – you finish it after a month and there’s nothing more to write about, meaning you lost. If you choose to difficult one, you will have trouble pushing it forward, but there will be always something to write about. We should have chosen something in the middle.
• Conversations – last year my main accusation to the contest was that people did not talk. Most of blogs did not have comments section or if it was there, there was no subscriptions to follow the discussion. This year it was different and way better. I left many comments, most of them had some kind of response. It felt much better.
  However, some of the blogs still did not have comments at all or they were heavily moderated. I think this should be put somehow in the rules for future editions – that the blog need to have comments.
• Diversity of technologies – Last year it was mostly about C# and .NET. I cannot say the same about this edition. There was plethora of technologies, some of them very interesting.

Summing up, I see a huge improvement. And I’m certainly not talking about number of participants, because I don’t really care about that.

My summary

First of all, let me say that I did not finish my project and didn’t even come close to it. Reasons are various. I think I picked definitely too difficult challenge, with both learning a completely new language (Rust) and completely different field (GUI in Qt). This was simply too much.

However, it went much better with the blog. First of all, I started to pay much less attention to perfection of my posts. Nobody cares anyway. Secondly, I started to write about simple things and I feel good about that. Not every post has to be after deep stuff, after all.

Last but not least, one of my posts turned out to be quite a hit, with more than 8k visits in one day, due to Reddit’s attention, and more than 15k visits in general in the whole month. I probably wouldn’t even write it if not for Get Noticed!

Will I take part next year? No, because I’ve heard that there won’t be an edition in 2018. But if it will come back in the future, I’ll probably consider. And I can definitely recommend the experience to anyone who is still waiting to get noticed.