The Explore page on GitHub, located at https://github.com/explore, is a great starting point to discover repositories that may align with your interests. It contains a mix of human and algorithmically curated content. Figure 9-1 shows a portion of the Explore page.
In the next several sections, we describe each section of the Explore page and its significance. Where it makes sense, we cover what you need to do to make your repository a candidate for inclusion in the section.
1. Exploring the headline section
The headline section contain three featured sites. At the time of writing, it featured
» A link to Build Your Own Octocat app at https://myoctocat.com
» A profile of Tiffany Ashley Bell, founder of the Detroit Water Project
» A link with information about an event, The Global Game Jam
You can check back on this section to discover interesting apps, people, and events that GitHub feels are worth featuring.
2. Discovering repositories
The next section under the headlines displays a selection of repositories based on your interests. This selection is pulled from the Discover page (https://github. com/discover), an algorithmically curated page of recommendations specific to you.
Click the heading, based on your interests, to see the full list of your recommendations (see Figure 9-2).
GitHub employs machine learning techniques to generate a list of recommendations based on repositories you’ve starred, contributed to, and viewed. The recommendations also factor in the people you follow on GitHub. Chapter 17 goes into more detail on these actions and why they’re important.
TIP: To improve the recommendations, be mindful of the repositories you star and the people you follow.
3. Trending repositories
The next section on the Explore page includes a list of the top 25 trending repositories. Click the heading to visit https://github.com/trending, a page where you can discover repositories and people that are trending across GitHub.
TIP: Why only 25 trending repositories? To have more than 25 trending repositories would dilute what it means to be trending. Also, it takes a lot to compute trending repositories, so limiting it keeps the cost low.
This page lets you filter trending repositories based on the primary language of the repository. If you’re interested in the trending JavaScript libraries, click the Other Languages button and select JavaScript.
The Trending button at the top of the page defaults to today, but you can click it to see what’s been trending for the week and month.
To determine what’s trending, GitHub looks at a variety of data points, such as stars, forks, commits, follows, and pageviews. GitHub weighs these data points appropriately and factors in how recent the events were, not just total numbers.
4. Exploring topics
The Popular topics section lists the most popular topics on GitHub. A topic is a user-applied category for a repository. A topic gives people more information about what a repository is about. A repository owner can specify multiple topics for a repository. The concept is very similar to tags or issue labels.
Figure 9-3 shows the list of topics for the thewecanzone/GitHubForDummiesReaders repository. Admins for the repository see a Manage topics link that lets them add or remove topics for the repository.
When you add topics, you type a portion of a topic name, and GitHub offers suggestions based on the topics that others use within GitHub. Figure 9-4 shows an example where we type novice, and GitHub suggests other topics with the word novice in them.
Visit the Topics page at https: //github.com/topics to see the most used topics on GitHub.
Clicking a specific topic is a great way to explore repositories related to a subject that you’re interested in. For example, if you’re interested in exploring Node.js repositories, you can navigate to https://github.com/topics/nodejs.
Topics are open-ended in that people can apply any topic they want to a repository. However, popular topics are often curated. For example, the Node.js topic page has a description and logo (see Figure 9-5). Figure 9-5 also shows the many options for sorting the topic’s repositories via the expanded Sort button.
The topic descriptions and logo are themselves specified in an open source repository. Anyone can suggest edits for an existing topic description. Anyone can propose a topic description and logo for a new topic.
The descriptions and logos are located in the https://github.com/github/ explore repository. For example, the topic logo and description for the Node.js repository is located in this directory https://github.com/github/explore/ tree/master/topics/nodejs.
5. Exploring Marketplace apps
The next section of the Explore page lists popular Marketplace apps. You can add these apps to a repository to enable more capabilities and improve the workflow when working with the repository.
Chapter 15 covers the GitHub Marketplace in more detail.
6. Exploring Events
The Events section lists a selection of upcoming GitHub affiliated events, such as GitHub Universe (GitHub’s yearly flagship conference), GitHub Satellite (smaller GitHub community events hosted around the world), and others.
Check this page often to find out about future events, which can be a great way to connect with the larger GitHub community.
7. Exploring collections
The next three sections are curated collections. At the time of writing, they are currently Front-end JavaScript frameworks, Learn to Code, and Probot Apps.
Each collection is fully curated by a human. A collection may contain a list of web pages and repositories. The goal is to be a great starting point for learning a particular subject in depth by listing websites for further reading and repositories with related code.
For example, to edit The Learn to Code collection, suggest an edit to this file in the github/explore repository:
https://github.com/github/explore/blob/master/collections/learn-to-code/index.md.
8. Getting by with help from your friends
Exploring what others on GitHub are up to is a great way to discover interesting new repositories. Whether it’s your friends or other people you admire, be sure to pay attention to what they’re up to on GitHub. One way to do so is through stars.
As you explore repositories on GitHub, be sure to star the ones that pique your interest. To see your starred repositories, go to https://github.com/stars. Starring a repository not only is a good way to bookmark a repository for later exploration, but it also is a nice way to show a repository some recognition.
On the bottom left of the stars page is a grid of avatars for your friends on GitHub. Click a friend to see the repositories she’s starred. Starred repositories often surfaces interesting repositories you may not have otherwise noticed.
You can also visit the profile page for your friends or other developers that you admire and look at their pinned repositories. Pinned repositories are repositories that a person explicitly chooses to feature. Figure 9-6 shows the pinned repositories for Phil, one of the authors of this book.
Source: Guthals Sarah, Haack Phil (2019), GitHub for Dummies, Wiley.