I have a few open-source libraries that you could call popular. I use a lot of others.
Open source isn’t a README, but it’s the cheapest marketing a developer has.
A world-class marketing person opens your README the same way they’d open a landing page, because that’s what it is. If you just wrote it like internal documentation—like developers wane through all day—it’s going to become a sore. The marketing-brain version treats the README as a conversion funnel where the conversion is “developer tries this and tells a friend.”
You spent six months on the library and four minutes on the thing 99% of people will ever see of it. That math is bad.
I’m not a marketer, but I’ve studied enough about landing pages (and deployed them to production) to have some sort of opinion here. Is it good? I don’t know, it’s impractical (if not downright quirky) to A/B test.
Zero in on your hero
The first section before any scroll is the most valuable real estate in the entire project and almost everyone wastes it. It needs three things and not really anything else: a one-line positioning statement, a small cluster of badges that signal legitimacy to build trust with the reader (build, version, downloads, license), and optionally a logo or a single screenshot/gif if the thing is visual.
I left out “the project name” because the user already knows why they’re there. You can put that after this section.
Note: positioning statement, not description. There’s a difference. “X for Y” or “the Z that does W.” Not “a fast, flexible, feature-rich whatever.” “Redis is an in-memory data structure store” beats “Redis is a fast, flexible, feature-rich key-value system supporting…” every time and it’s not even close.
Caffeinate says Caffeinate is a drip engine for managing, creating, and performing scheduled messages sequences from your Ruby on Rails application.
The one-liner is the single hardest sentence to write in the whole document and it deserves disproportionate effort. Rewrite it ten times. It does more work than any other sentence in the project. Treat it like ad copy because it is ad copy.
The “why should I care” paragraph
Two to four sentences, immediately after the hero. Not features. The problem it solves and who it’s for.
Every engineer instinct is to list capabilities here. Capabilities are for later. Relevance is for now. If a reader doesn’t see themselves in this paragraph they close the tab and you never get them back. The tab is closed. It’s over. Answer: “This is the pain you’re facing and this is how I made it less painful.”
Caffeinate offers the typical tragedy that it solves.
A code example or screenshot, fast
Show, don’t tell.
For a library this is usually a minimal “here’s what using it looks like” snippet that fits on a laptop screen without scrolling. The example should be the most flattering possible representation of the library—the simplest case that still demonstrates the value prop. Not the most powerful case. Not the most complete case. The most flattering one. Stripe’s docs are the canonical reference here and it’s not an accident they’re cited every time someone writes a post like this.
If the project is a platform and not a library, use the most glamorous and story-telling screenshot possible.
Install in one block, copy-pasteable
If I were to rewrite Devise, I would show:
bundle add devise
rails g devise:install
rails g devise User
rails db:migrate
rails s
open "http://localhost:3000/users/sign_in"
Don’t make them think.
If installation genuinely requires more than one step, the marketer will lobby hard to make the first step the one that produces a visible result, and push the rest to a setup guide. “Do this and you’ll see something” is the goal. “Do these nine things and then you’ll be ready to do something” is how people bounce.
A quickstart or 5-minute tour
Next is “oh I see why this is useful.”
This is where most READMEs go off the rails. The engineer instinct is to be comprehensive—show every option, every config, every edge case. The marketing instinct is to be ruthlessly selective and link out for everything else. The quickstart isn’t a feature tour. It’s a success moment. One. Just one. You’re trying to deliver dopamine, not completeness.
Features, framed as benefits
If features appear at all, they’re written as “X so that Y,” not “supports X.” Bullets are fine. Three to seven of them. Each one sentence.
“Supports websockets” is engineer copy. “Real-time updates without polling, so your dashboards feel instant” is what the marketer rewrites it to. Same feature. One of those sentences makes someone want to try it. The other one makes someone scroll past.
Social proof
Logos of companies using it. GitHub star count if it’s good. Testimonial quotes from known developers. Links to talks and posts about it.
Engineers undervalue this badly. Marketers know it does enormous work. Even a single “used in production at $COMPANY” line shifts perception, because the reader’s brain stops asking “is this a toy” and starts asking “how do I use this.” That’s a different question and you want them asking it.
Comparison or positioning
If there are obvious alternatives, address them. A short “how is this different from X” section.
Marketers love this because it answers the question already forming in the reader’s head. Engineers avoid it out of politeness. The compromise is a factual, generous-toned comparison rather than a hit piece. “X is great for Y; this is better for Z.” You’re not dunking, you’re orienting. The reader is going to make this comparison anyway—it’s better if you frame it than if they Google it.
Documentation, contribution, license, credits
At the bottom, in that order. By this point the reader has either bounced or converted. This section is for the converted.
The cross-cutting stuff a marketer would harp on
A few things that aren’t sections but apply everywhere.
The README is not the docs. It is an ad for the docs. Every instinct to be thorough is the wrong instinct. Cut. Link out. Cut again. If something matters but doesn’t fit the funnel, it goes in a separate doc. The README is the trailer, not the movie.
Voice matters more than developers think. A README with a distinct voice—even a slightly opinionated or funny one—outperforms a neutral one. Tailwind, Bun, htmx, Astro. All have personality. It’s not a coincidence. Neutral copy reads like it was written by committee because it usually was, and people can tell.
Visuals carry disproportionate weight. A single well-chosen gif demonstrating the library in action is worth roughly an entire feature list. If the thing can be shown, show it. The gif is the most efficient unit of communication available to you and it costs 20 minutes of recording to make one.
Optimize for the skim. Assume the reader gives the README eight seconds before deciding whether to keep reading. Eight. Short paragraphs. Put the most important thing first in every section. If your first sentence in a section is “in order to understand X, it’s helpful to first consider Y,” congrats, they’re gone.
What to actually go look at
If you want a worked example of any of this, the READMEs for Bun, Tailwind, Zod, htmx, and Drizzle ORM are all closer to landing page than docs and would be cited as benchmarks by anyone who thinks about this seriously. Stripe and Linear’s broader docs sites are the gold standard for the same instincts applied at scale.
The depressing part, if you’re a maintainer who’s been writing READMEs the engineer way for a decade, is that most of this isn’t hard. It’s just different. You don’t need to be a writer. You need to spend an afternoon thinking about your project the way a stranger sees it for the first time, and rewrite accordingly.
The README is the only part of your project most people will ever experience. It’s worth being weird about.