Extending a Core Laravel Package to Gather Over 375k Downloads

I didn't set out to build a package that got even 3,000 downloads, much less over 300,000, I just wanted to send notifications from Laravel using the fancy new Slack message formatting, Block Kit. I originally submitted a PR to the official Slack package, but it was rejected. Block Kit was brand new and has a lot of surface area to cover, so it was understandable that the core team didn't want to take on the burden of supporting it. So instead I created laravel-slack-blocks.

It was deprecated last year in favor of the official package after they came around to adding support for Block Kit.