Starcharts: Visualizing GitHub Stars Over Time
A brief introduction to the project:
Starcharts is a unique open-source project hosted on GitHub. Available to everyone, Starcharts provides a simple but effective tool for visualizing the accumulation of stars gained by repositories over time. In today's dynamic environment, this can serve as a particularly relevant tool for project maintainers, developers, and enthusiasts interested in tracking the popularity and user interest of various GitHub projects.
Project Overview:
Starcharts aims at solving a specific but crucial need – to visualize the growth or accumulation of stars for GitHub repositories over time. While GitHub provides a feature to star a repository, there is no native feature that enables users to visualize this accumulated interest graphically. With a compelling visual representation provided by Starcharts, everyone from project maintainers to individual developers can monitor the rising popularity or falling interest of a project. Starcharts targets primarily developers, maintainers, or even tech-driven organizations who want to track the user interest for various open-source projects.
Project Features:
Starcharts offers an easy-to-use tool where users just have to enter the name of the project or its repository and subsequently generates a graphical chart representing the star-accumulation over time. This chart can be used to assess core interest in the project, indicating periods of rapid growth or stagnation, and even periods where the project lost stars. Moreover, Starcharts boasts a minimalist design focusing on ease-of-use and clarity of data portrayal, making it accessible to even non-tech-savvy users.
Technology Stack:
Starcharts is built using Go as the primary programming language, known for its simplicity and efficiency. For web serving, the project uses Gin – a web framework written in Go that delivers a performance which can compete with NodeJS. Besides, Starcharts also uses Google Cloud Functions to run the Go code putting it into serverless architecture, where developers can write and deploy code without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.
Project Structure and Architecture:
The architecture of Starcharts is kept simple and intuitive. The entire codebase lies in the root directory with organized Go files for various components. The main.go file works as the entry point which integrates various other modules to use Google Cloud Functions effectively. Each module is designed to perform a specific task – data fetching, chart generation, etc., while working together seamlessly to deliver an efficient and visually appealing representation of project popularity.
Contribution Guidelines:
As Starcharts is an open-source project, it warmly welcomes contributions from the developer community. The project has set up guidelines asking contributors to maintain accuracy in data representation and clarity in design. In case of any bug reports, feature requests, or code contributions, the maintainers encourage opening a new GitHub issue and discussing the changes before making a pull request.
