In the light of my previous article that sparked controversy, A Dive into FreeCodeCamp Stargazers, I wanted to enumerate the different options one has in order to achieve the most rewarding thing you can do on GitHub: accumulate a boatload of stars! This way, everyone would stand the same chances for glory and accomplishment (depending on how far you are willing to go).
One of the common misconceptions people usually make is that the project needs to be well-written, tested, performant, and every other positive technical adjective you could think of. While I wouldn’t dare say it does not matter, what I want to convey is that these rules can be bent or left ignored.
Here is a sneak peak of how much you could potentially get after reading this tutorial, I counted them and there is approximately two hundred and ninety-one thousands!
Michael Ver SPRILL, National Geographic
Social
While this one was a bit obvious, some basic advices won’t hurt the common neophyte.
First, you need do it on the right platform. Having a huge GitHub persona with tons of followers starring your repository won’t usually have a significant impact. The reason for this is that it will only be displayed on the activity front page which can get quite clustered depending on the number of people you follow, how much activity they do, and even the projects you are watching/contributing to. You will get some out of this, and in case other characters with big user bases follow, it might highlight and create some hype around it; but don’t expect this to happen often.
The platform of choice in my opinion is Twitter, because people tend to read a bit more their timeline, and you can promote it a bit better: add a fancy gif, some description text, you got the idea. Retweets can easily make it blow up if you manage to get it in high followers accounts circles.
HackerNews is also an option, but it’s more generally used for articles, it might be interesting to use in concordance with Twitter; or you can go all the way and write a post on Medium, put it on HackerNews, and tweet it.
Timing is also an important factor: although it might be obvious, don’t publish your new coolest JavaScript animation library the same day another is released and trending, you will stay in its shadow. Also try not to do it on Mondays, since people are catching up work and they probably won’t have time to wander like they can in mid-end of week.
Having a friend or colleague with a big amount of Twitter followers is of course the easy route, but it’s unfortunately a luxury not everyone has.
A sheep might have be a better choice here, but It’s good enough.
‘Fun”
Aaah, after a stressful day of work, fixing border-radiuses and changing the background hex on a button, who wouldn’t have a nice laugh? People are always willing to give a star to something they cracked up to, so why not exploit that? It’s always nice if you can do this on a website that looks work-related instead of 9gag or Reddit.
Here are a few examples you can inspire yourself off of.
- semicolon: people hate for ASI projectified in a new language — 114 ⭐️
- vapor.js: 0 bytes library, also available as a minified version (related to Mikeal vanilla.js, not sure which came first) — 985 ⭐️
- illacceptanything: accepts any non-malicious PR — 1389 ⭐️
- is-thirteen: Allows you to check if a number is equal to 13 — 1857 ⭐️
- ArnoldC: Programming language based on the one-liners of Arnold Schwarzenegger (brototype & others in the same vein) — 5140 ⭐️
- hackerscripts: Inspired by a true Russian story, reimplementation of the scripts mentioned in multiple languages — 30330 ⭐️
This last one is a bit special given it being a follow-up of a very popular blogpost, but gives you an idea of what can be done if you combine both social and fun, you can see it as stars multipliers.
News/Political
If you are able to make something related to recent news (add another bonus if it is political), you’re up to get some.
A relatively recent topic that worked quite well was the Volkswagen case, where they cheated CO2 emission tests. phpunit-vw (1615 ⭐️) and the node equivalent volkswagen (6048 ⭐️) are the two main examples of these, making unit tests pass on CI even if they don’t. Weirdly enough, I didn’t see any project called Chrysler, General Motors or even Peugeot... Is that because VW had the courage to admit its mistakes when the others did not? Thinking it was the only car manufacturer cheating on these tests seems a bit naive, but I hope I can be proven wrong.
And of course since last year and America presidential election turnaround we saw a surge of these kind of projects, the most famous being:
- Is-Now-Illegal: Gif creation app (1350 ⭐️)
- trump2cash: Trading bot hooked to Trump twitter account (4086 ⭐️)
- TrumpScript: Python ArnoldC copycat (5687 ⭐️)
I have to signal that the latter does acknowledge the overdose of the joke, and redirects to more meaningful initiatives, props to that. Maybe we won’t see these as often this year.
Growth Hacking
Now we’re getting in the core of the subject and potentially the way you can get the most out of.
As freeCodeCamp has already been covered in the other article, I won’t expand on it anymore, but this GitHub search ordered by star count in descending order should be self-explanatory.
More recently, another project is getting some traction, github-profile-summary, showing some stats about your GitHub activity, pretty cool. It does however require you to star the repository as a way to prevent people from accessing profiles of big users of the platform, arguing that it would consume the rate-limit of the API too quickly. My only remark is that in case a heavy GitHub user actually wants to use it, this will deplete the app ability to do queries. Why not have some conditionals checking on the user total count of repositories / commits / stars to prevent the fetch of these results and|or limit the data to a certain amount of paginated entities for each user?
To resume, you need to make it a bit subtle, and if you have a reason to justify it, the better.
If you have no morality at all, you could totally setup some GitHub OAuth login and automatically make your users star a given a repository (make sure to put a little disclaimer at login time so you don’t violate the ToS).
Please keep in mind that I’m not endorsing any use of such code, but merely putting in light something I’m sure people might have used in the past, or even right now.
Conclusion
If you get a project that is politically oriented from recent news, fighting for a good cause, fun at the same time, setup a little website requiring to star and you are able to make it blow up on social media.. We won’t be talking about a few thousands stars anymore, but the whole Milky Way that is up to your grasp.
I could potentially plug one about Net Neutrality and Ajit Pai fidget spinners here, it should be a fairly easy task to check all the boxes with such a subject since it’s something everyone cares about lately. I’ll let someone else do it, and will instead remind you of something a little more dramatic which is currently happening far away from the USA territory (which does not threaten your network traffic getting throttled): Libya instability and recent slave trade reports.
Here is a link to Save the Children Foundation donation page, it won’t be stars on a GitHub repo, but in other’s people hearts.