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✨ Checklist to create an engaging presence on GitHub

📋 Checklist

🎉 Choose a good name for your project

Naming is important. A good name will make your project attractive and can help people discover it.

🎯 Provide metadata

GitHub allows to associate a description, URLs and tags to your project. You should make use of this and provide a short and catchy description and some tags that should be associated with your project. One of them should be internet-computer. Furthermore, you should attach the link to your landing page or project website.

📘 Create an informative README

The README.md is the public resume of your project. It should at least provide a high level overview and the goals of your project. See example of a README file [here](https://github.com/dfinity/grant-rfps/blob/main/grants/

Some other useful content of your README could be:

📐 Provide an overview of the architecture and tech stack

A brief description and an architecture diagram helps visitors quickly understand the high-level architecutre of your project.

Some tools to create architecute diagrams:

  • Exildraw - Web editor to create beautiful diagrams in hand-written style.
  • Mermaid - Diagrams as code directly embeddable in GitHub Markdown.

🚧 Provide an update on your milestones and the progress

You can create a checklist of your features and milestones to give visitors a clear picture on the goal and the current status.

  • Read checklist
  • Improve my repo

💡 Provide a description on how to use your project

How can people use or build/run your project. If you want to have others contributing to your project, you should also add instructions covering this.

🎨 Add some visuals

People typically can get much more information on a blink if you provide a picture or a short video/gif that shows your project in action.

Some tools that might be helful for this:

  • Kap - Screen recording with GIF export (Mac only)
  • VHS - Tool to create GIFs of cli demos
  • Carbon - Tool to create buitiful code snippets

📃 Add a license

If you don't add a license then people can't really use or learn from your project since they might fear legal repercussions.

If you want to a permissive licence then MIT is a good choice, if you want to get more help in choosing a proper license, you can check out https://choosealicense.com/.

If you already have a repository and want to add a license, here's a how to.

📚 Additional resources

There are quite a few guides on how to improve the GitHub presence of your project that go far beyond the basics provided here. This gets important in particualar when you want to attract additional contributors ot your project.