How I gained my first 30+ stars on GitHub
I wanted to reflect on how I got my first 30+ stars on a GitHub repository.
Awesome lists
What are awesome lists?
An awesome list is a list of awesome things curated by the community. There are awesome lists about everything from CLI applications to fantasy books. The main repository serves as a curated list of awesome lists.
I really like browsing GitHub for ‘awesome lists’, one of my favourites is awesome-selfhosted which contains a list of selfhosted tools and resources.
I wanted to create my own collection of free and open-source aviation project that I know of. While working in aviation, I always had those sources in mind but I never kept a written collection of it, so I am doing this also for my personal benefit.
As of the writing of this post, my list contains almost 20 entries (mostly data sources). In the coming days I intend to expand it further with more data and tools. Ideally I would love to have a nice mix between data-only sources and custom scripts/tools.
I got spotted
Shortly after publishing the list, I got spotted by Cyber Detective, an account which specializes on Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). They shared a link of my repository on X which then got 8k views.
I was quite surprised by the rapidity at which my list (just a siple README file) got discovered. It is probably due to the ‘osint’ and ‘awesome-list’ tag that I put on GitHub.
Growth so far
What’s next
My list was featured in other people’s awesome-list which is nice to see. To make it more “attractive” (again, it was just a README file), I decided to add a Python script that will look for any data source present in that file and append a table containing information for each data source like the one below:
| name | last_modified | row_count |
|---|---|---|
| airports.csv | 2024-06-12 07:53:40 | 79,604 |
| runways.csv | 2024-06-12 07:53:40 | 45,908 |
| regions.csv | 2024-06-09 07:53:30 | 3,935 |
| airport-frequencies.csv | 2024-06-07 07:53:29 | 29,376 |
| airport-comments.csv | 2024-06-01 07:53:29 | 15,442 |
| navaids.csv | 2023-06-04 07:53:28 | 11,020 |
| countries.csv | 2022-11-03 07:53:39 | 248 |
| airports.dat | 2019-05-13 11:54:02 | 7,697 |
| airports-extended.dat | 2019-05-13 11:54:02 | 12,667 |
| airlines.dat | 2017-02-02 11:32:12 | 6,161 |
| routes.dat | 2017-02-02 11:32:12 | 67,662 |
I even added a GitHub action to run the script every day, but I recently turned that off (for now) as I was not happy with the way it commits the repository.
I haven’t received any pull requests or comment about the list itself. So if you would like to contribute to it, you are more than welcome!
Overall, I think the key to success was the simplicity of the content as well as a good series of tags to make it more ‘discoverable’ on GitHub.