If you’re a regular reader here, you’ll know we absolutely love open source.
In particular, we have a soft spot for the small, practical repos, the ones that don’t look like much at first glance, but turn out to be incredibly useful.
We’ve rounded up a few we’ve come across recently that you can start using straight away — whether that’s to ship something faster, present your work more clearly, or just make your developer life a little smoother.
1. LittleLink
LittleLink is a super simple “link in bio” site, like LinkTree… but open source.
Of course there are others out there, but LittleLink’s simplicity is probably it’s best quality.
It’s just HTML and CSS, no framework, no bloat.
To get started, just clone it, edit the links and buttons, and deploy to GitHub Pages (or anywhere). A few clicks and you’ve got your own Linktree-style page on your own domain
2. Open Props
Let’s be honest, Tailwind has become wildly popular in modern web development, particularly for developers working with frameworks.
But, when you’re working on a project where the bloat of a framework just isn’t welcome, and where Tailwind is less straight-forward to install, you might miss the speed that Tailwind’s utility classes give. This is where CSS custom properties (aka varaibles) come in handy.
Open Props is a collection of modern CSS custom properties, including shadows, gradients, font scales, spacing, easing, palettes and swatches and more, all ready to drop into your project.
3. JSON Resume
Sure we all have a LinkedIn profile, and probably a portfolio website too, but resumes (also known as CVs) are a must-have.
JSON Resume lets you define your CV as structured JSON (very dev-friendly), then generate beautiful resumes from it using different themes. Instead of redesigning your CV every year, you update one source file and regenerate.
4. Developer Portfolios
We all love having our own little slice of the web, and developer portfolios are often more than just a place to share links to projects. They showcase your abilities, link together projects, probably host blogs or technical articles a lot more.
The best way to improve your own site, is to get inspired by others and this repo has over 1400 links to developer sites of all kinds (of course a frontend portfolio is probably quite different to that of a data analyst, for example).
In the spirit of open source, be sure to submit a pull request add your own to the list when you’re done.
5. Awesome Selfhosted
We’re all guilty of signing up for new subscriptions for tools we’ll probably over use once, when self-hosted alternatives would have likely saved us both the time and money we spent.
Awesome Selfhosted is a massive curated list of software you can run yourself. From project management tools and analytics to file sharing and note-taking apps, it’s a reminder that you don’t have to pay for every SaaS product.
Even if you don’t use the applications yourself, it’s a great place to get inspiration for new projects, and see what is out there that you might want to contribute towards in future.
Share Your Own
None of these repos are flashy, but they remove friction, solve problems or save time - things that software does remarkably well.
Whether you’re improving your online presence, looking for native alternatives to frameworks or paid products, GitHub is a well of incredible projects and communities that will make your life better. If you leverage GitHub repos in your daily life or job, be sure to send them to us for a future article (and credit).