6 GitHub Repositories For Instant Knowledge Boost

Github is not only a place for storing our code and sharing libraries with other developers. Thanks to powerful Markdown syntax it’s possible to create sort of wiki pages. There are thousands of great resources in the Github - some of them are so big that recommending them is pointless.

Saying “Heh, checkout Awesome-List repo*” is like saying “Hey, there is this awesome website where you find anything, it’s called Google”

That’s why I would like to focus on smaller and more single-subject repositories.

* Awesome-list is the biggest list of links and resources for developers

Effective Engineer Notes [4 min read]

This small repository is like a single article or checklist for software developers who want to

• Improve speed of the dev process
• Learn quicker by improving learning habits
• Be more focused and productive while coding

Except focusing on being more effective it gives you some hints on how to be a better software engineer. Most of the tips are highly inspired by knowledge spread by software architect guru Martin Fowler.

Great things that should be highlighted from this repo are for sure: Invest in Iteration Speed and Fail Fast sections.

Also at the bottom, there is a bunch of other resources, but I did not get familiar with those yet.

Tech Interview Handbook [1 day read]

Great resource for any developer who struggles with passing through interview process.

Algorithms section is cool packed piece of knowledge we all learn at first year at any university but then we forget it till we graduate and look for a first job.

Part of During the Code Interview is also a must.

Big List of Naughty Strings [not for reading I guess]

Inside the repository, there is a file blns.txt. It contains a long list of strings that you may use while testing user inputs in your app.

If you have a unit test with a data provider specified it may be pretty quick to implement a part of the list for the most crucial part of your app.

The most important part of the list itself?

Definitely #Script Injection part - starts around line 320.

Free Programming Books [your entire life]

Well this repo is a little exception from what I wrote in the introduction. It’s huge. If you were to read everything there one life would be not enough.

Free for dev [30 min read]

 or just https://free-for.dev/#/

This is a list of tools that you may use in your daily work. Requirement for tools on that list is having some kind of free plan. You may be sure that if you don’t have enterprise needs you’ll find free apps here. The cool thing is that it’s focused on typical dev applications, so there is just one section for app like Jira or Trello - which normally are listed on any “X best tools for developers”.

Sections you need to discover: Miscellaneous as it contains completely random things you may even know that exists. Also Api & Data part is great.

You Don’t Need [few hours read]

Great repository that gathers different articles written in a “You don’t need X” way. This is mostly set of tips why developers these days over-engineer apps. Especially in JS ecosystem world people tend to use frameworks and tools because there is a hype for them not because of real need.

I would say this reading is a must.

You should start with You Don’t Need to Transpile Your JavaScript.

Thanks for reading my list. I hope you not only bookmark those repos - bookmarking is easy. But I truly hope you’ll read and use some of them.

The power of those repos lies in the fact that most of them are created by programmers from the passion.

They are not yet another marketing product to promote some famous dev company.

What are your famous wiki-repos? Comment bellow. And yep we all know Amesome Repository :)

Follow me on Twitter at @mfarajewicz to stay up-to-date with my publications.