Gitroom

Surprise! GitHub20k is now Gitroom! 🚀

I have been working closely with Odigos lately to get them more visibility.
It’s a super sophisticated product - one of its main features is EBPF auto instrumentation.

As a full-stack developer, I can’t tell you that I fully understand it - But one thing is clear: their audience is very sophisticated.

The DEV move

I usually preach to people to use DEV.to as it has a pretty good amount of traffic, and it’s easier to get it, but most of the people there are juniors, and if your article is not JS-friendly, you might not get a lot of traction there.

Yet, DEV helped us to get Odigos trending.
Getting to the GitHub trending feed is pretty simple: quickly get as much activity as possible.

The most straightforward activity is stars.

That’s why I usually push for “Give us a star.”

Here is what we have done:

1. DEV Listicle

Like it or not, DEV listicles work and are easy to create.
We created a pretty basic, generalized one with a top CTA for Odigos.
The most important thing is the title and cover.
The article generated almost 20k views.

Check out the article here

One question I have been asked is how can we curate a good list

Github20k Discord - Many people listed their Repository. Feel free to list yours there (if you have) and add them to your list.
Product Hunt open-source - Newly launched products are usually more mature with a marketing website.
Console.dev - This is a fabulous newsletter to find open-source projects.
Scoutflo Atlas - a great list of open-source tools you can explore.
Gitlibrary.club - My list of open-source repositories added by maintainers.

2. Reddit /r/selfhosted

The Reddit /r/selfhosted is the most robust channel to promote your open-source repository because it’s 100% self-promotion.

Some people think you can only post there once, but the reality is that people forget that you posted there.

Every time you have a decent version, post it there; don’t be shy.
You will also get a lot of feedback.

Prepare it for big launches.

3. Influencers

There are many types of influencers. Some can address a more seniority level, and some can handle a more junior base level.

For obvious reasons, there are many more juniors than seniors in the world (in general), so if your goal is to attract great contributors or clients, you might need sophisticated contributors.

In our case, we wanted more stars to be trending on GitHub, so we created a very basic thread that generated a lot of stars for us.

5 GitHub repositories a developer should definitely check:
— Pratham (@Prathkum)
4:00 PM • Nov 1, 2023

4. Hackernews

While Hackernews is a gamble (not always working), some specific articles are more likely to get accepted.

Performance comparison
More extensive models (like bigger LLMs)
Things that contain graphs
Open-source packages
Architectural explanations

In our case, we used eBPF-based auto-instrumentation outperforms manual instrumentation

That goes to the first category: Performance comparison.

Here is how it works:

You post it in Hackernews. It appears on the “newest” feed only on your computer. Make sure you open an incognito window to see that it’s accepted.
You ask every possible person to go to Hackernews, to the newest feed, and give you an upvote - Don’t send direct links, as they can detect it.

Odigos is a YCombinator company, and they have an unfair advantage of getting accepted to the main feed.

You should apply to YC to have this advantage 😺

One more additional note is - CTA

Once you have created that specific article, you will get tons of views on your page - What’s next? Do you want people to read it and churn? Probably not.

As with the DEV article, ensure you have a prominent call-to-action to go to your GitHub and give you a star.