DEV Community

Cover image for My journey from 0 to 1K followers on GitHub
Vinit Shahdeo
Vinit Shahdeo

Posted on

My journey from 0 to 1K followers on GitHub

Hello Dev Community ๐Ÿ‘‹

Iโ€™m unbelievably humbled to have hit this mark, much obliged to the 1000+ folks who found my weekend's sip of code worthy of following! Despite all the problems we faced, 2020 has been a great year for me and now, I'm starting 2021 on this happy note.

Vinit Shahdeo Year in Review

git init journey@vinitshahdeo Back in 2016, I was introduced to GitHub during my college days at VIT and I found it so interesting that it soon became my homepage. The advent of this journey was marked by a simple web application performing basic calculations like squaring and cubing a number on GitHub and now when I look back, the green dots on my profile show how far I have come.

Vinit Shahdeo GitHub Contribution's chart

Recently I've accomplished a self-set milestone of becoming trending #1 developer on GitHub.

In the last two years, I have been part of many open-source programs(GSSoC, SWoC, Hacktoberfest, etc.) where I got a chance to engage with the community and mentored many beginners to kickstart their open-source journey. Sometimes, I feel like I am not able to enjoy my favorite series on Netflix but helping beginners to create their first-ever pull request compensates for these missed moments. Along the way, I met a lot of amazing developers who are transforming open-source into a more and more awesome space. Always grateful to the community for making GitHub a better place to stalk!



console.log('Drop your username, let me stalk you!');


Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Last year when pandemic hit us, I built a COVID-19 ๐Ÿ˜ท Tracker ๐Ÿ‡ฎ๐Ÿ‡ณ which got featured in newspapers.

GitHub logo vinitshahdeo / COVID19

A web app to display the live graphical state-wise reported corona cases in India so far. It also shows the latest news for COVID-19. Stay Home, Stay Safe!

COVID-19 Let's fight together with Corona! ๐Ÿฆ  ๐Ÿ˜ท

COVID-19 Dashboard

Do checkout latest COVID-19 Tracker ๐Ÿ“Š | INDIA ๐Ÿ‡ฎ๐Ÿ‡ณ

โ•”โ•โ•—โ•”โ•ฆโ•—โ•”โ•โ•—โ•ฆ โ•ฆ  โ•ฆ โ•ฆโ•”โ•โ•—โ•”โ•ฆโ•—โ•”โ•โ•—
โ•šโ•โ•— โ•‘ โ• โ•โ•ฃโ•šโ•ฆโ•  โ• โ•โ•ฃโ•‘ โ•‘โ•‘โ•‘โ•‘โ•‘โ•ฃ 
โ•šโ•โ• โ•ฉ โ•ฉ โ•ฉ โ•ฉ   โ•ฉ โ•ฉโ•šโ•โ•โ•ฉ โ•ฉโ•šโ•โ•
โ•”โ•โ•—โ•”โ•ฆโ•—โ•”โ•โ•—โ•ฆ โ•ฆ  โ•”โ•โ•—โ•”โ•โ•—โ•”โ•โ•—โ•”โ•โ•—
โ•šโ•โ•— โ•‘ โ• โ•โ•ฃโ•šโ•ฆโ•  โ•šโ•โ•—โ• โ•โ•ฃโ• โ•ฃ โ•‘โ•ฃ 
โ•šโ•โ• โ•ฉ โ•ฉ โ•ฉ โ•ฉ   โ•šโ•โ•โ•ฉ โ•ฉโ•š  โ•šโ•โ•
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

๐Ÿ‘จ ๐Ÿ‘ฑโ€โ™€๏ธ ๐Ÿ  ๐Ÿ˜ท ๐Ÿ™

Stay HomeStay Safe Netlify Status

๐Ÿ”Ž Click here to visualize the state-wise ๐Ÿ“Š Corona Cases in India! Keep yourself updated with latest news related to COVID-19.

Mentioned in Awesome Open Source Love

Iโ€™m sure youโ€™ll agree that, at this point, it isnโ€™t an exaggeration to say that we are at war against the coronavirus and that it is a war we must win. The next few weeks are critical in this battle. I request everyone to stay at home and enjoy good time with family.

COVID-19 Tracker | India - Get real-time state wise stats of COVID-19 in India | Product Hunt Embed

This is a small effort from my side to keep yourself updated with number of coronaโ€ฆ

A pandemic often brings websites with misleading information along with it. With this spirit, I built a COVID-19 Tracker to protect people from falling into the trap of rumours. Being a human who can code, I couldn't think anything better to give back to the society.

Lastly, never compare your first chapter with someone elseโ€™s last chapter. Your first repository can even contain a code to check if a number is even or odd, but someone may benefit from it. As time goes by, you can contribute by addressing issues, contributing to the codebase, reviewing othersโ€™ code, and improving documentation. In the future, your digital footprint will carry more weightage than your resume. GitHub is the best place where aspiring software engineers can build their portfolio.

I highly believe that if you're a techie, your homepage should be GitHub, not Instagram. Maintain a streak on GitHub as you maintain one on Snapchat. Get addicted to the green dots. Participate in competitions, connect with developers, indulge in communities and learn from everyone.

DISCLAIMER: The code you write matters more than the followers you have. Having less number of followers on GitHub doesn't mean that the person is a newbie. I always agree that the number of followers should never be a metric to define a stellar GitHub profile. However, a GitHub profile with more followers doesnโ€™t hurt ๐Ÿ˜‰. Having green contribution streaks makes your profile more attractive, and people might actually follow you!

Thank you for reading this ๐Ÿ’™. Listen to the podcast below where I've shared my journey!

PS: Grateful to GitHub for the dark theme ๐Ÿ–ค, I'm no longer suffering from the retina-burning white theme of default UI.

Vinit Shahdeo GitHub

Find me on Twitter | GitHub | LinkedIn.

Top comments (3)

Collapse
 
lissy93 profile image
Alicia Sykes

It shouldn't be about the number of followers or stars you have, but rather about creating / contributing meaningful projects that you enjoy working on.

In recent years there's been more and more emphasis put on stars, followers, achievements, contribution counts, etc. And it's not an accurate representation of a programmers skill, nor is it particularly healthy.

Collapse
 
debugagrawal profile image
Deepak Vijay Agrawal • Edited

"I highly believe that if you're a techie, your homepage should be GitHub, not Instagram."
Epic.๐Ÿ™Œโœจ๐Ÿš€

Amazing journey๐ŸŽ‰๐Ÿ™Œ

Collapse
 
muttissalat profile image
MuttisSalat • Edited

It shouldn't be about the number of followers or stars you have, but rather about creating / contributing meaningful projects that you enjoy working on.

But in the recent years there's been more and more emphasis put on stars, followers etc. So we get GitHub followers and Stars from Github24 and Github-Stars