I... genuinely had to go check where stars are even shown on github. 🙈 Apparently I've become extremely good with subconsciously ignoring this stuff, probably because I play a lot of video games...
How many times have you gazed upon an open source project, and wondered fabulously about the correlation between the number of stars garnered and the actual value of the project?
If it's zero, then ok, you're a better person than me.
I... genuinely had to go check where stars are even shown on github. 🙈 Apparently I've become extremely good with subconsciously ignoring this stuff, probably because I play a lot of video games and you learn to ignore this or you overspend on microtransactions all the time.
Just for myself, much more important to judge a random repo by is it's README and/or other supporting documentation. Stars doesn't mean a whole lot to me. I guess it's kinda cool to see that...
Just for myself, much more important to judge a random repo by is it's README and/or other supporting documentation.
Stars doesn't mean a whole lot to me. I guess it's kinda cool to see that something is popular, but there's a lot of very useful stuff out there with a small number of stars. Plus as time goes on, I feel like there's too many developers trying to live an almost "influencer" lifestyle of sorts and spend a ton of time (maybe too much time) self-promoting. Sorry, this may be too cynical a point of view!
(I don't necessarily have anything against self-promotion, but I've worked with a few developers in my career who's top priority was clearly their "e-fame" and I've become somewhat allergic to that.)
Hearing that you can buy stars is disappointing but not all that surprising these days. Sadly.
Lack of recent commits isn't necessarily a good judge of anything. It depends. The repo in question may just be functionally complete and hasn't needed any additional work (yet) and might still work just fine with current updates of the language, runtime, dependencies, etc. But I won't lie and claim I don't look at that too. I definitely do.
But really, to me, the repo's README file is by far the most important thing. Does it have a clear explanation of what this repo is about? Including decent-ish instructions for basic usage? Inline examples and/or links to example code (if included elsewhere)? Links to external documentation? Does it look like it's been kept up to date along with any recent modifications to the code? etc etc. It doesn't usually take too long to glance at a README and get a general sense of how approachable this repo will be.
I give a small amount of consideration to the Stars, Forks, and Watches numbers, but the first thing I judge a repo or package by is the development activity which, for me, means age and recent...
I give a small amount of consideration to the Stars, Forks, and Watches numbers, but the first thing I judge a repo or package by is the development activity which, for me, means age and recent commit activity. This applies not just to github, but also language package ecosystems (npm, gems, pips, etc.).
I... genuinely had to go check where stars are even shown on github. 🙈 Apparently I've become extremely good with subconsciously ignoring this stuff, probably because I play a lot of video games and you learn to ignore this or you overspend on microtransactions all the time.
Just for myself, much more important to judge a random repo by is it's README and/or other supporting documentation.
Stars doesn't mean a whole lot to me. I guess it's kinda cool to see that something is popular, but there's a lot of very useful stuff out there with a small number of stars. Plus as time goes on, I feel like there's too many developers trying to live an almost "influencer" lifestyle of sorts and spend a ton of time (maybe too much time) self-promoting. Sorry, this may be too cynical a point of view!
(I don't necessarily have anything against self-promotion, but I've worked with a few developers in my career who's top priority was clearly their "e-fame" and I've become somewhat allergic to that.)
Hearing that you can buy stars is disappointing but not all that surprising these days. Sadly.
Lack of recent commits isn't necessarily a good judge of anything. It depends. The repo in question may just be functionally complete and hasn't needed any additional work (yet) and might still work just fine with current updates of the language, runtime, dependencies, etc. But I won't lie and claim I don't look at that too. I definitely do.
But really, to me, the repo's README file is by far the most important thing. Does it have a clear explanation of what this repo is about? Including decent-ish instructions for basic usage? Inline examples and/or links to example code (if included elsewhere)? Links to external documentation? Does it look like it's been kept up to date along with any recent modifications to the code? etc etc. It doesn't usually take too long to glance at a README and get a general sense of how approachable this repo will be.
I give a small amount of consideration to the Stars, Forks, and Watches numbers, but the first thing I judge a repo or package by is the development activity which, for me, means age and recent commit activity. This applies not just to github, but also language package ecosystems (npm, gems, pips, etc.).
Plenty of good stuff sees no activity - they might be mature