Demos

A hosted demo of your code is a great way to drive adoption, it gives junior developers a working starting place. For complex prototypical uses, demos are a much better resource than a walkthrough. Especially if you have to integrate many components to build a meaningful application, a demo can be far more usable.

Writing a demo also gives you the opportunity to demonstrate idiomatic design patterns for the project that junior developers can use as a start for small projects, or at hackathons for project starts. Take this opportunity to show the design patterns you intended when you wrote this- it will help the design of your API become clearer to see it in context.

Demo-Walkthroughs: & Interactive Playgrounds

To make your demo more approachable by junior developers, add a demo walkthrough. Call out the parts of the application where your specific integration occurs, and explain how it works. Explain the tweakable parameters, host it on a demo provider, and it becomes a playground. This is a super-charged learning environment that dramatically increases the success rate of integrations.

Checklist

• Runs when downloaded and installed
• .env file is set up with required environment variables (such as API keys needed for the application to work)
• Packages are version-locked
• is hosted or at least easily deployable
• Setup instructions include
  • Installation command (eg, npm install)
  • Run command
  • Test command
  • Deploy instructions
  • Required APIs / resource URLS
• Tweakable parameters are explained
• Build is connected to a CI Server