I Keep Building Open Source Projects Nobody Uses. Here Is Why I Won't Stop.

I have more than 80 public repositories. If I am honest about it, most of them are used by exactly one person: me. Some have a handful of stars. A few got forked and then the forks went nowhere. By the metric the open source world loves, downloads and adoption and contributors, most of my projects are failures. And I am not going to stop building them.

The graveyard, and why it is not sad

Scrolling through my GitHub is like walking through a graveyard of ideas. Half-finished experiments. Tools I built for a problem I had once and never had again. Libraries that solved something for me and turned out to solve it for nobody else. It looks like a record of abandonment.

But I do not read it that way. I read it as a record of curiosity. Every one of those repos is a thing I wanted to understand badly enough to build. The fact that the world did not need it does not erase the fact that building it taught me something.

I do not build open source to be used. I build it to understand. Being used is a nice side effect, not the point.

The star from Germany

Every so often, something small happens that makes the whole thing worth it. A stranger, in this case someone in Germany whose name I will never know, stars one of my repos. Just one star. No issue, no message, no fork. But it means that somewhere, far from Kathmandu, a person looked at a thing I made and thought, this is worth remembering.

That tiny signal does more for me than it should. It is proof that the work escaped my own machine and touched someone. In a field where most of my output is private client work under NDA, the public repo is the part of me that is visible to the world, and a single star is the world quietly nodding back.

What building for the builder means

There is a phrase I keep coming back to: build for the builder. The first and most important user of anything I make is the version of me who learns by making it. If a project teaches me a new pattern, a new tool, a new way of thinking, it has already paid for itself before anyone else sees it.

• The repo nobody uses still taught me the thing I now use everywhere in paid work.
• Writing code in public, even unused code, makes me write it more carefully.
• A portfolio of curiosity says more about an engineer than a portfolio of finished, popular products.
• The act of finishing and pushing, even a small thing, is a muscle, and most people never build it.

Why I will not stop

Because the metric I am optimizing is not adoption. It is growth, mine. Because every repo is a small act of learning made permanent and public. And because every now and then, a stranger in another country leaves a single star, and for a moment the work is no longer just mine. That is enough. It has always been enough. I will keep building things nobody uses, because the person who needs them most has always been me.