Things i learned from the creator of summatra pdf

2023-10-24

Yesterday while browsing through hacker news, I encounter this article written by the creator of summatra pdf, who summerized some of his insight on mainting a open source application by vey few individuals over a long preiod of time. Here are some of my take aways.

  1. Sometime good things come out of accidents. Summatra was an accidental app, and an accidenal sucess. It was not intentially created, but was created in a convinient time

What do you know: I had a simple PDF reader for Windows. I released it on my website. It couldn’t do much so I tagged it as version 0.1.

Getting early users, learning what features they want the most beats toiling for months or years and implementing lots of features before you know anyone even cares.

  1. Frequent release, but also release notable changes.

On one hand I don’t want to release too often but I also do want the users to get new features as quickly as possible. My policy of new releases is: release when there’s at least one notable, user-visible improvement.

  1. Documentation and presentation is important for everything, even an opensource software

From day one I created a website for the app. It had screenshots, it had documentation, it was easy to download and install.

  1. Simplicity sells

  2. Oftem times you product differs from the rest by simple tinggs.

Thinking outside of the box is hard because the box is invisible. SumatraPDF wasn’t the first PDF reader application ever written. But most PDF readers do not become multi-format readers.

  1. With the limited amount of energy you have, do a few things excellently instead of many things mediocrely.

  2. Overnight success takes decades

Success often takes a long time. Unfortunately, at that stage it’s undistinguishable from (eventual) failure so this wisdom doesn’t help you if you’re working on a not-yet-successful project and debating if you should continue or abandon

  1. Maintaining an open source project for such a long time takes true passion, because open source does not make money.