Hello Community!

I am again elated to share that I had the privilege of being recognized as a GitHub Star for the second time in a row. Being a GitHub Star is a wholesome journey from just creating an account on GitHub to getting selected as a GitHub Star.

And, getting a glimpse of some of those journeys can help all aspiring people become the best version of themselves and be recognized as a GitHub Star. Hence, I've stuffed this article with the stories of 10 GitHub Stars so that you may relate to your aura and get a sense of what's cooking in the GitHub Star's pot and know what you may learn from them all.

The GitHub Star Program symbolizes those who go above and beyond, elevating those who inspire and educate your communities. It is a single-source platform for all open-source admirers who are transforming the tech industry as a single-shared globe of source code that anyone can review, alter, and improve and is modifying technologies incredibly.

According to my fellow GitHub Stars, open-source is something that gives developers,

Freedom!
Freedom to share & collaborate!
Common grounds to cooperate!
Inspiration to innovate!
Spreading joy and bringing people together as one!
To redefine the developer experience for everyone!

What excites GitHub Stars most about open-source?

Open source allows people to collaborate and advance the commons with developers from all over the world, resulting in the creation of something that can be used by anybody, anywhere, at any time without restrictions or expiration.

Eddie Jaoude says, open-source provides the opportunity to learn in public with the community, where one can implement any concept and learn about other people's ideas, all while sharing your own individuality!

Having access to a large number of projects allows you to see how great things are built behind the scenes, but it doesn't end there; anyone can contribute to these projects whenever they can or need to. It provides a one-stop-shop for showcasing their technical talents.

Open source, in the words of Alex Ellis: "Open source began as a means of improving developer tooling and scratching my own itch, but it has now opened up a whole new world to me. On one hand, I have strong relationships with the communities that surround my open source projects, and I like watching them add to and improve upon my initial concepts. On the other hand, I now consider dozens of creators and maintainers to be friends with whom I share a common journey."

According to Liran Tal, open-source software is more than just code, it's a philosophy and a movement that strives to openly share work so that everyone can benefit from it.

Expeditions of GitHub Stars ⭐

The following is a list of 10 GitHub Stars' journeys as told by them. I really hope you enjoy reading their "GitHub" way of life.

Gina Häußge

She has been developing a web interface for consumer 3D printers since late 2012. OctoPrint is a Project that has been totally crowdfunded since 2016. She made a lot of stuff on the side, but OctoPrint, according to her, was her biggest and longest-running project, which she's been maintaining since then and for which she was nominated. She invested a lot of time not only maintaining the project, but also creating an ecosystem and a community around it, teaching, enabling, and so on. That seemed to match what GitHub was looking for in its stars.

Nikita Sobolev

Even after achieving the status of GitHub Star, He is a down-to-earth person who believes that there are far more talented developers out there and simply enjoys his work and intends to continue doing so. According to his own words - "Right now, I can't imagine my life without it. Find your own ways to express yourself, do what drives you. And be pragmatic!" He had created the most stringent and opinionated Python linter ever and is currently working on adding typed functional programming to Python.

Eddie Jaoude

He has been utilizing GitHub since the beginning of his career and has now established himself as a GitHub Star. For EddieHub, the open-source community he started, he designed an EddieBot, an open-source bot that promotes inclusive language so that everyone can feel welcome and safe. Day by day, his community and he are constantly updating and developing it. GitHub, he claims, is an amazing place to share knowledge, network with others, and improve his talents. And, as a result of his consistent contributions and content creation to help the community, he was nominated to be a GitHub Star.

Feross Aboukhadijeh

With the explosion of open-source software in use, he felt the need for a new approach and built a Software supply chain security with the mindset of vetting all dependencies. Socket was founded to assist developers in securing their software supply chains. Socket aids in the prevention of insecure or malicious open-source packages infiltrating apps. In addition, he worked on open-source projects such as WebTorrent and Standard JS.

Daniel Stenberg

He has been working on open-source since at least the mid-1990s, and his major time on GitHub was around 2010 onwards when he received an email asking him to accept the nomination for being a GitHub star, which was entirely the consequence of his selfless and constant efforts to the industry. As he puts it - "I don't work on "interesting ideas". I work on bringing fundamental Internet functionality to the world, in a usable form."

Avelino

Since 2008, he has been contributing to open-source projects and has been a part of some of the most outstanding and well-known projects, including Golang, Django, MongoDB, Riak, and many others. He's now working on creating a chronological database with git internals(tree structure).

Alex Ellis

A GitHub Star who quit his job in 2017 just to serve the community and support end-users spending the most of his working week on GitHub, from issue assistance to pushing code, bug fixes, and feature additions, producing block posts and documentation via GitHub Pages, and writing to his GitHub sponsors on the weekends. He primarily makes transferable functions between cloud and on-premises environments, as well as unlocking limitations embedded into cloud functions such as timeouts, payload sizes, and supported languages.

He gets feedback on what to build from the community and clients, including products like arkade, which makes constructing local Kubernetes setups easier than before. K3sup simplifies the installation of a small Kubernetes cluster, and inlets connect containers, Pods, and VMs to the Internet.

He even has two GitHub Actions eBooks. And as a GitHub Star, He also reviews new features and helps test the ones that could assist many of his workflows.

Gift Egwuenu

As a community contributor, she accepted the duty to educate and actively generated resources for developers to assist them on their quest to become world-class developers. She has been creating a series of videos on YouTube called Cloudbits in which she teaches developers about cloud technology ideas in a very short and easy-to-understand manner. In addition, she is a conference speaker and organizer.

Liran Tal

He's been a long-time supporter of the open-source ecosystem, from open source projects to speeches, workshops, security research, and tools he's created. Nowadays, he's been experimenting with everything from rich CLI like dockly, which manages Docker containers from the CLI, to recently experimenting with gigsboat, which helps you track all of your speaking engagements entirely on the GitHub platform, with no tools or hosting required. Aside from that, he's fascinated by open source software supply chain security and has been active in a number of activities in this field in the hopes of improving the existing situation and creating a more safe ecosystem for developers all over the world.

He says, "Becoming a GitHub Star is the manifestation of demonstrating all of these values which the program appreciates - educating, enabling, and inspiring developers."

Vinit Shahdeo

Back then in 2014, just a curious soul wondering how Facebook works, and five years later, his curiosity and the open-source community led him to become a Software Engineer at Postman, the world's leading collaboration platform for API development during which he stood to support his country with a stand against the pandemic and built COVID-19 Tracker overnight which has helped numerous of people a lot in tracking down the number of cases in a single click to let people stay aware of the situation.

Open source, he feels, kept him on his toes and inspired him to continuously strive for more. The 'GitHub' way of life has increased his motivation and appreciation for all that he has received, and he now aspires to contribute even more to the community.

Words of Wisdom: Straight from the GitHub Stars ⭐

According to my fellow GitHub stars, it's not about how much time one spends on GitHub, but about the quality, and when you start treating your work like someone you care about, a daily visit is a necessity.

Becoming a GitHub Star was not a goal for any of us; it was a byproduct of a lot of hard work and making open source a huge part of our lives.

Gina Häußge would like to remind you all to take care of yourselves and to remember to breathe and rest; there is no need to rush. At the end of the day, it's all about how to constantly carry out your contribution to the community and you'll be rewarded for your efforts, which is impossible without proper health.

Eddie Jaoude encourages his younger self to start learning in public sooner than he did since he realized along the way that it's better to start right away than to put off your interests for vague reasons, and when one understands what they truly want in life, they should never waste time to achieve it!

Feross Aboukhadijeh advises you to participate in the open-source first, rather than feeling guilty about not responding to GitHub issues, and foremost to have fun and learn because the best productivity of technical people like us never comes out under stress, and we can only shine when we love and enjoy what we do rather than treating it as a task to be completed.

Daniel Stenberg encourages you to follow your heart because it will lead you to routes where you can continue to share love and kindness around the world and keep it going indefinitely.

Avelino explains, "Code is not the end, it is the means for solving a problem. Talk to people more and practice your text communication, always assuming that what is evident to you is not obvious to someone else - provide as much context as possible to everyone involved, even though the information is obvious to you, it may not be obvious to the other person."

Alex Ellis claims that now that he understands what is achievable as a consultant and entrepreneur, he wishes he had quit his full-time job much sooner. He writes about business, marketing, sales, and open-source every week, yet he thinks these are the kinds of things he could have used ten years ago!

Liran Tal suggests you to be brave because it takes a lot of guts to stand out and do something different from the rest of the world, allowing you to be seen apart from the crowd.

Gift Egwuenu, being a woman herself, encourages all of the younger girls to be that girl who goes out of her way and beyond to do incredible things, quit being afraid of the unknown, and never miss the opportunities because you will regret it for the rest of your life if you do. It's pointless to live a life saying "maybe it would have happened," when you can develop what could truly make it happen today and leave your mark on the world.

And I say - "If you're a techie, your homepage should be GitHub, not Instagram!"

When someone wants to start something new in their life, the only thing they seek is the source of motivation to do so and, when you get through their stories for yourself and see how much effort they put in and have the respect they deserve, you should be encouraged by them. Therefore, I hope that by reading this, you have a better understanding of the genuine tale of their hard work and commitment to the community.

And hence, I'd like to ask you all to nominate someone as a GitHub Star in your knowledge whose journey inspires you and who has stood up and gone above & beyond for the community.

Lastly, you may interact with GitHub Stars on Twitter and ask your queries. I have tagged them in this tweet. ⬇️

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I'd like to express my gratitude to my fellow GitHub Stars for sharing their remarkable experiences and the time they put in to do so. Along with this I also want to thank Trilochna Vaid for her assistance in drafting this article.

Happy Open Sourcing! 🎉