It's September 23 tomorrow & that means the GitHub Actions Hackathon on DEV is coming to an end. I thought it'll be neat to jot down my thoughts on how much of a success I felt my GitHub Action was.

Did my Action work?

When I ran my GitHub Action on my own repos, it did spot spelling errors which was awesome. Plus it was pretty nice knowing I could share the code with my mates & get feedback on it.

How many people used it?

Tracking usage is pretty hard, but according to DockerHub I had 322 pulls of the docker image. I managed one star on the GitHub repo & when searching for the actions name, it looks like a few people have been using it.

It's pretty cool I wasn't the only person who used it, but it's kind of a shame I didn't end up with a big bunch of users.

Did anyone pay for it?

I requested that people using my GitHub Action on Private Repositories purchase a license key via GumRoad. I really was quite excited to see if GitHub Actions could offer a little bit of extra income for me.

No one purchased a license. So that was a little disappointing.

Would I write other GitHub Action?

Maybe! They're not that difficult to build and can offer a lot of value to developers.

I don't like how they're very hard to monetise, which does inherently makes them unsustainable in my eyes. I imagine if I had built something for myself & just wanted to share it, a GitHub Action could be a good way to go about that.