Don't wait for top 10 lists. Do this instead (Github)
Have you ever been reading through a list of top Github projects and seen a very popular project that you have never heard of?
You are not alone:)
It is very obvious that, in contrast to other industries, the IT space is incredibly dynamic. New projects appear out of the blue and can disrupt domains or entire industries. For example, if you look at a "Top 10" list for any given topic, you might see a project that has gained a huge amount of attention, and you have never heard of it.
Let's take a few examples from the DevOps space.
Have you ever heard of coolify? If not, here's a a very super brief description:
it's an open-source alternative to Vercel. Period😄
There are many more game-changers and trendsetters in all areas: front-end, back-end, AI, you name it.
These projects are shaping the industry and are probably providing great solutions for common problems. If you've never heard of them, you might be missing something huge and maybe even reinventing the wheel every day.
So let's look at possible solutions to this "problem".
Using GitHub's Search by Topic Feature
GitHub has a powerful search feature that allows you to filter by tags and trending projects. This is done using topics, which can help you discover new projects in your domain of interest.
If you have dozens or even hundreds of starred projects, manually searching might be a bit tedious.
To streamline this process and stay ahead, I've developed a tool, GithubExplorer, that allows you to find trending projects based on your favorite repositories. This tool can:
- Fetch your starred projects.
- Cluster them based on topic tags (e.g., AI, Java, etc.).
- Allow you to search for trending projects within those tags or clustered domains.
- Highlight projects you already have and those you might have missed.
You can use it now for free.
Note: Of course, there are projects that provide huge benefits for a niche yet might not have a lot of stars. Keeping an eye on those might require a different strategy not covered in this tutorial or tool.
Here's how it works:
Find Trends by tags
The tool recognizes that you have plenty of repositories with a specific tag like llm and searches for trending repositories with that tag.
Find trends by tag clusters (domain)
GitHub Explorer can automatically cluster your tags and help you find trending repos related to that cluster. For example, "data processing and analytics."
Find similar projects to a starred project
Finally, you can find similar (trending) projects to a given project. For example, if you are looking for alternatives to llm-app, you might discover ragflow, which is also a very interesting project in the RAG space with almost 20k stars.
Please note that the tool is based on a cross-analysis of tags, so projects with poor tagging might not be discovered properly. The focus is not on showing all alternatives but rather the trending ones for a given domain based on the given tags or clusters of tags.
Conclusion
With these tools, you can discover trends in your specific domains unbiasedly and based on your preferences (starred projects).
Now it's your turn to dig deeper into those trending projects and see which ones might be your next game-changer:)