What I learned after maintaining my first package for 8 months
What is the package?
About eight months ago I released my package Laravel-maps, the goals was to create a better experience for people that want to use maps in their website / webapp. By creating blade components that can easily be used. Currently it supports leaflet.js and google maps. 
What happened since?
The first release of laravel-maps ( https://github.com/LarsWiegers/laravel-maps ) was on 26 of May 2021. Since that 9 more versions have been released and the package has been downloaded over 3600 times. That's freaking amazing. I am actually amazed that 3600+ people thought the package was worth their time and wanted to try / use it in their apps / websites.
Issues
In total 13 issues have been created by users. Which was awesome, as I had not really had the experience of being a maintainer for an open
Downloads over time
The install statistics.
Source: https://packagist.org/packages/larswiegers/laravel-maps/stats
Forks
It is weird seeing people forking the repository and then not changing anything. Why do people do this?
Is it like a backup of the dependency so that if it disapears they can use that version?
Time spent
After the main development of the package, the time requirements were really low. It takes me maybe 30 minutes per 2 weeks to maintain the package.
Why im scared to release a v1.0 Releasing a v1 would be cool. But what if something brakes? You would immediatly have to release a v1.1. That would look bad. It also kinda makes this thing official and says "This package works and you should be able to use it". The current version system v0.* makes it easy for me to still change the syntax. This causes some stress.
Getting feedback
Seeing people create issues was awesome as it meant they were actually using the package. Some quotes from people in the issues:
"Awesome. Works on my end!" "This is a very good solution actually. Thank you very much! You made my day 😃" "Hi @LarsWiegers I would've done it exactly the same way. I haven't tested it myself, but it looks as one (or at least I) would expect. 😃" I would love to see where it was being used on what pages / webapps. I can't currently do that and it sucks. Sure downloads are a good indicator if something is being used but actually getting analytics or something would be awesome. I wonder how other open source developers think about this? Maybe i can include like a ping back in the package if people enable it. (would obviously be not enabled by default). Let me know what you think about that.
What am i working on next?
Im working on a new package, sneak peek here: https://github.com/LarsWiegers/laravel-translations-checker. It allows you to not worry about the translations in your application. I have often published to production and then saw missing translations. That sucks and this package should take that worry away.
Have any feedback feel free to email me at: larswiegers@live.nl or send me a message on twitter @larswiegers is my handle.