I built Snipsy because I was typing - [ ] fifty times a day and getting annoyed about it.
That's a true sentence and also a misleading one. The text expander I built for Obsidian is a one-week problem, technically. The actual project, the part that took nine months and 28 releases, was figuring out how to keep a thing alive after you've shipped the first version. I knew none of this when I started.
Nine months later, Snipsy sits at almost 1000 downloads in the Obsidian community plugins catalog. Small numbers, by absolute standards. But it's published, it's maintained, and people actually use it. Which, judging by the graveyard of half-shipped opensource projects on GitHub, is the rarer outcome.
Getting into that catalog is its own gauntlet. My pull request to the Obsidian community plugins repo sat with a ready for review label for six months before a maintainer merged it. Six months of waiting, and that turned out to be the easy part - the technical formality. The real work started the day after the merge.
Here's what the 28 releases taught me. Not in the heroic-lessons-from-the-journey sense. More like: things I wish someone had told me at release one.
