I first started promoting Emu86 by posting in two Facebook groups related to computer science: Ladies Storm Hackathons and Hackathon Hackers. In the post, I described how Emu86 needed users to help us further develop the product and to reach out to their professors. Although both groups have at least 15000 members, only 1-3 members replied back saying how it was a cool and interesting product. In addition, there was a lack of response as to whether anyone reached out to their professors.
Continuing down the Facebook publicizing path, I tried to search for other assembly language Facebook groups to see if I could directly interact with group members who use or teach assembly language. However, the groups I found were mostly inactive.
Later on in the semester, I reached out to Professor Sandoval to see whether he would be interested in demoing Emu86 for his Intro to Assembly Language course. Since he uses AT&T syntax for his class, I worked with him to make sure that the code he was going to use for the demo would work. For example, we added the TEST instruction to his code to test his demo. I found out later from a student in his class that he posted the website link to Emu86 in his slides for his students to try it out.
After Professor Sandoval finished his demo, I went on Google to search up ways to further publicize open-sourced repositories. Some websites suggested publicizing on social media. I thought back to the tutorial videos that WayScript made for users regarding how to create and run a script on their website. Keeping that idea in mind, I decided to create a YouTube tutorial video on how to navigate and code on the website.
In addition to creating a YouTube tutorial, I also posted on HackerNews asking for users here. Unfortunately, no one replied or upvoted the post.
Since the website is meant to help students learn assembly language, I reached out to my APCS teacher at Stuyvesant, Mr. DW, about whether the CS teachers there would be interested in using Emu86 and if he has any recommendations as to how to publicize. I also emailed Professor Frankl for advice on how to publicize the product.
Although I received no replies to my emails, I still continued reaching out in hopes of a response. Professor Callahan suggested that I contact Thomas Caswell, a developer for Matplotlib, for advice, but sadly, Caswell said that he joined Matplotlib when it was already well established and does not have experience in publicizing.
To further broaden the circle of contacts I could reach out to, I signed up for a SIGCSE student membership and joined the SIGCSE-member mailing list. I emailed the SIGCSE-member list asking whether they would be interested in being users for either the website or the Jupyter kernel. A few professors replied back saying that although they are not teaching students for this current semester, they were impressed with Emu86. Some even replied back with small feedback such as changing the font of the code editor to be uniform across all browsers and to highlight lines while stepping through the code. However, only 3 professors replied out of the entire mailing list and there wasn't a definite response that they would be a long-term user who we could keep in touch with.
After Professor Tan joined as a new Computer Architecture professor, I emailed him to see whether he would be interested in using Emu86 for his class since the website also has MIPS listed. However, he said that he has already moved past MIPS in the course but will spread the word about Emu86. From this experience, there seems to be a small number of assembly language users. Some already found a website emulator to rely on while others are simply not interested in using Emu86. Although I have received positive responses for how the website looks and works, the product still continues to lack users.