My first 100 GitHub stars

When I first made my GitHub account, I hadn’t heard of version control and thought it was just another site to store files, similar to Google Drive.

After learning what git can truly do and about the awesome open source community, I made a goal for myself to contribute to the community and have a trending repository.

My repositories as of Jan 26, 2017.

Today marks a big milestone in my long term goal. I’ve hit 100 stars ★ on a single repo.

TRMosaicLayout was born when I was trying to create a view similar to Snapchat’s story view on iOS. The idea was definitely not original as I was inspired from this blogpost as well as a similar iOS library.

An issue with the open source community is that it is so big. Therefore, everyone has their own use case and most of the time you won’t be able to find an exact library that will fit you needs. The best you can do is find a similar library and tweak it to your fitting.

That is exactly what I did. The library I found was written in Objective-C and had a slightly different design. I then decided to write a similar library using Apple’s new language, Swift 🔶.

Note: A tip I’ve learned for open source libraries is that it should be as generic as possible so that it can be flexible to fit other use cases. Also, documentation is key.

After I pushed the library to GitHub and released it on Cocoapods, a iOS package manager, I shared the library in as many places as possible. I pretty much wanted to drive as much traffic as possible so that the library can hit GitHub’s trending list. I’m not 100% sure what their algorithm is that decides what is and isn’t on the list. I believe it includes the number of stars you’ve received in a day as well as overall traffic and views. If you can get about ~20–25 stars in the first day, you should be able to make the Today’s list for that language.

It took me ~7 months to get the 100 stars in that library. A bit slow, but its a start. In between then and now, I’ve added a few more public repositories that get some traffic.

Now onto the next milestone: 1,000 stars!