ZeroMQ

Spinning Off a Library Project

At this stage the code is growing larger than an example should be, so it’s time to create a proper GitHub project. It’s a rule: build your projects in public view and tell people about them as you go, so your marketing and community building efforts start on day one. I’ll walk through what this involves. I explained in Chapter 6 about growing communities around projects. We need a few things:

• A name

• A slogan

• A public GitHub repository

• A README that links to the C4 process

• License files

• An issue tracker

• Two maintainers

• A first bootstrap version

The name and slogan first. The trademarks of the 21st century are domain names, so the first thing I do when spinning off a project is to look for a domain name that might work. Quite randomly, one of our old mobile projects was called “Zyre,” and I have the domain names for it.

I’m somewhat shy about pushing new projects into the ØMQ community too aggressively, and normally I would start a project in either my personal account or the iMatix organization. But we’ve learned that moving projects after they become popular is counter-productive. My predictions of a future filled with moving pieces are either valid, or wrong. If this chapter is valid, we might as well launch this as a ØMQ project from the start. If it’s wrong, we can delete the repository later, or let it sink to the bottom of a long list of forgotten starts.

Let’s start with the basics. The protocol (UDP and ØMQ/TCP) will be ZRE (the ...