100,000+ "thank-you"s

At some point in the last couple of days, I passed a milestone. 

The public* packages I have made available on NuGet have now been downloaded over one hundred thousand times.

In the grand scheme of things, this isn't a large number. There are many packages with hundreds of thousands of downloads. Some of those packages get more downloads on an average day than my packages have had over several years.

So does this seem like a milestone even worth acknowledging?

I think so.

The above figure represents thousands of people (developers--they are people too) who I've been able to help save time and effort. It may be with a trivial, one-off task, or it may be something they use multiple times a day and in apps used by thousands of people. 

Download numbers like this are only relevant to the packages and the people who make them. I've known some developers over the moon because they never expected even a few hundred people to use the thing they created. In contrast, I've known other developers complain that the thing they created didn't get millions of downloads in the first few days.

This is a bigger number than I ever expected to reach but I also expect to produce many more packages in the future. Little by little, as I stick around and keep doing the work, the numbers go up. 

These tools may not have made a dent in the universe but they probably contribute to a small dimple. Maybe, over time, more dimples will add up to a dent. 

They may not be the most popular packages in the world. But that's not what I set out to create. I saw gaps where tools would be useful and produced tools to help with those situations. A small gap in the market that one person can quickly fill will rarely become massively popular, so I had set my expectations accordingly.

However, a niche product can be really useful to people who need it.

Many of these packages are now redundant (because they relate to platforms that no longer exist--the platforms aren't publicly available or supported in any way) but these packages serve as a reminder to myself (and maybe others) that I'm here for the long term. I haven't just shown up in the open-source world, made something quickly, and then gone away. It's also a reminder that small gaps can also be worth filling. Not only do they help with the things that I work on but they are also useful and helpful to others too.

I think the above figures help quantify part of my contribution to making the world a better place through open-source software.

Of course, my contributions aren't just about niche tools for underserved platforms and environments. I also contribute to much larger projects too. Some with many millions of downloads.
The combination of working on a breadth of smaller scenarios with my tools and much larger projects as part of a group of contributors, helps me become a better developer.

* There are a couple of private ones I have removed ("unlisted") because of name and dependency changes. They definitely shouldn't be used.