Write project documentation.
It’s surprising but I still see projects, usually done by people who don’t have GitHub/open-source experience, that have no documentation at all.
They do the project with their team passing knowledge IRL or in chat and believe they don’t need to document it.
This is bad because it makes it harder for people who are going to use the code later to figure out how to build it, how to test it, what it is supposed to do, etc.
And the funny thing is - writing a simple project documentation in README doesn’t even take long.
30mins - 1hrs and you can have a good enough overview project documentation.
That documentation can save a lot of time for next-generation developers that maintain the project.
If you think from a purely cost-benefit analysis, it makes sense too -
Time spent to write the documentation = 2 hrs
Assuming dev rate at $60/h, that’s $60 * 2 = $120 in added costs.
And if there is no documentation in a project, a dev will spend a day or more figuring the project out.
So you will lose $60 * 8 = $480 at least on just on-boarding one developer.
So it makes sense to write documentation, even if it is not perfect.
Writing documentation is as important as writing code.