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# What you can learn from an open-source project with 500 million downloads


- **Date:** Thursday, Jul 10, 2025
- **Time:** 16:50–17:20 (30 min)
- **Room:** Stage 4
- **Event:** World Congress 2025
- **Tags:** c#, .net, open source

## Recording

[Watch recording](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/1556-what-you-can-learn-from-an-open-source-project-with-500-million-downloads)

## Description

After more than 12 years of development, our pet project, Fluent Assertions has almost reached the 500 million downloads. Providing a high quality library like that doesn't come for free. We've been trying to write code that is clean enough for our contributors, write tests that are self-explanatory, ensure breaking changes are strictly controlled and try to make it easy to use. 

In this talk, I'd like to share the tools and techniques we have been using, how they've enriched our day jobs, and how they may do that for you too. 

I'll talk about the release strategy, documentation, versioning, naming conventions, code structure, the build pipeline, automated testing, code coverage, API change detection, multi-targeting and more. 

## Speaker

### [Dennis Doomen](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/@dennis-doomen)

Hands-on architect in the .NET space with 27 years of experience on an everlasting quest for knowledge to build the right software the right way at the right time


## Related talks at this congress

- [Why (most) software projects fail silently...](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2025/sessions/669-why-most-software) — Hendrik Lösch
- [Harnessing the Power of Open Source's Newest Technologies](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2025/sessions/868-harnessing-the-power) — Francisco Carneiro
- [Achieving Design Excellence in Open-Source Software](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2025/sessions/690-achieving-design) — Martin Keary
- [How GitHub secures open source](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2025/sessions/670-how-github-secures) — Joseph Katsioloudes