GitHub Stars Award

I’m humbled to share that I’ve been awarded a GitHub Stars Award and status by the good folks at GitHub. 8th worldwide out of 60 million developers on GitHub. It feels great to be recognized for my open-source work. You can check my profile here. Or you can follow my open-source work on GitHub.

I’ve been creating open-source software for more than a decade. Joined GitHub on August 4, 2011. I was in college at that time. I remember using GitHub in 2009 but never registered on it. No one in the college taught us, git.

Then I taught a workshop to a group of students as their teacher’s assistant on how to start contributing to open-source. Created an open-source repo to crowdsource sorting algorithms. We all had a lot of fun back then.

Ten years later, most of my career direction has been towards building Free & Open Source Software (FOSS). Open-source has brought me a lot of opportunities. It’s helped me connect with a global audience.

Companies like Google, PayPal, Netflix, Microsoft, and Amazon use my code in one way or another. My code (FOSS contributions) runs in almost every WordPress, Node.js, webpack, React, and a number of other applications —both on earth and in Outerspace (via NASA). 🚀

Open-source also has a lot of problems. The biggest most prominent problems are open-source funding and telemetry. Hard to find out where your code ends up and many many enterprise companies use your code and don’t think about supporting open sourcerers.

Anyhoo — that’s a story for another day. I’m always excited to share what I build with others. Thank you for supporting my work. I code to do good. You should too. Feel free to follow me on GitHub and let’s hang out on Twitter.

Peace 🕊️

UPDATE: GitHub Stars program was launched today and to my surprise, I’m one of the featured GitHub Stars on the homepage. Also, received a surprise stars swag box that I’m going to unbox soon. Can’t wait to share what’s inside. And one more thing, I now have over 10K stargazers.

Woohoo! 🥳🥳🥳

2021: Nine months into the program, this is probably the best champions program I’ve been a part of. Martin, Anisha, and everyone else involved is super connected and we get awesome swag every now and then.

As a matter of fact, I just received my GitHub Stars Award. I can’t stop starring at it. It’s remarkable. Here are a couple of pictures I took.

Open-source has a place for you…#

Over the last week, when I shared the pictures of a gold GitHub Stars Award I received from GitHub — I got a lot of questions from the dev community on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook (and in groups like this, this, and this) about how to get started with open-source, how do I find time to do that and more.

There are so many projects that would love more contributors. It doesn’t matter if it’s in the form of documentation, community management, writing code, or something else — there’s always a place for you, for everyone.

If you find it hard to get started, I’d recommend you start by sharing bits and pieces of repeatable code snippets you write in more than one project. So many projects need help with documentation; if you’re a writer, you can contribute that way. No contribution is too small.

P.S. I shared this on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. If that’s your jam.

Humbled — I just got the gold @GitHub Stars Award 🎉

Woah! Can't stop starring at this remarkable thing.

It feels great to be recognized for my open-source work. Spent over a decade building & helping the FOSS developers community.

Thank you, everyone, who made it possible. pic.twitter.com/EtijB42USa

— Ahmad Awais (@MrAhmadAwais) April 20, 2021