I'm currently the sole maintainer of an API that a friend and I have written. It is currently written in Java, and is designed to make a lot of the low level interfaces high-level, to help ease the learning process of beginners learning Java. It's sole application is in my school, where other students who have never programmed before use it, to use in basic projects. For example:
import arctic.lights.dev.FileIO;
public class getLettersInFile
{
String[] fileLines = FileIO.getAllLinesInFile("path/to/file.txt");
}
It's well documented, but we're looking to seriously expand it, and make it available to other beginner developers and schools.
Currently, since it's not very active, and is only used within our school, updating and maintaining the project is easy, and not very troublesome. However, since we are expanding it, and making it available to other schools.
With the school year coming up, my friend and I are becoming increasingly nervous about expanding, and the lack of available time to successfully maintain the project. Currently, the project is not publicly available, but we're looking to hosting it and getting a license for it. If we do make it available, our main concern is creating a backlog of requests and issues among places. With courses that start in September, we're predicting that the biggest spike in activity is going to be at that time, especially if bugs are found. Pull requests likely won't be very popular - the end users of the API don't really know much about programming...
My friend and I have a couple questions:
- Should we be looking for an extra maintainer to alleviate a predicted backlog? As students, is it appropriate to be looking for an extra maintainer?
- If we do end up looking for an extra maintainer, what should we be looking for in a potential maintainer? This maintainer won't likely come from our school (my friend and I are the most competent developers known), so we want to make sure that we find someone that won't try to "take over" the project, as it's also a learning experience for us.