I’ve been working on eaf-linter for about a few days now, and it already has 6 stars and 2 forks. My other project that I've been working on, the Backend Server, has 14 stars, 9 forks, and nearly 10 outside contributors. That might not sound like a lot, but both of these projects are only about a week old.

So, how did I do it?

The most important thing has been issues, which I talked about here. But, the second most important thing has been designing a great readme.

A good readme is the difference between someone staring your project and someone ignoring it. If you have badges, easily understandable features, and lots of images, you have a star worthy repository.

First, you need to have badges. If you don't know what a badge is, it's the little image that says how many stars, downloads, etc. a project has. These are also known as shields, and you can get them from this website. If you have a ton of them and they all say good things, it increases the confidence that someone has in your project.

Secondly, you need easily understandable features. If you look at my newest repository, eaf-linter, you will see that all of the features have a simple headline and they link to a new page. This is very important. If your feature can link to a more in depth description of the feature, it will increase the confidence that the possible contributor has in your project.

Finally, images are super important. In my backend server, I have a ton of really eye-catching images. These images increase the likelihood that someone will keep looking through your readme, and the longer that the person stays on your page, the more likely they are to star your repository.

There will be more tips like this coming tomorrow and the day after, so if you liked hearing this, make sure to follow me, so you can see more tips as they come out.

Also, our open-source, non-profit is hiring right now if you're interested. Don't forget to follow us on LinkedIn.