If you’ve ever started an opensource project on Github without any following whatsoever, you know the struggle of making people care about your project because -and this is the main problem of Github- the website doesn’t promote your project if you haven’t enough stars and the search function is not designed to discover new projects either. So, if you want people to use and contribute to your project, you need to promote it yourself and a lot of people don’t get that or don’t know how to do it.

Since I’m struggling with this problem right now with my project RocketDB, I will not be able to help you with that. Instead, I will try to showcase some of the hidden gems that I found that have less than a thousand stars on Github.

This Github project has no star as I’m writing this article.

Description :

Manage your personal finances more easily and conveniently on a single spreadsheet!

Assemble your own financial spreadsheet in 2 minutes! Write down your expenses and payments, plan the budget and save! Leave the calculations and organization of the notes for the spreadsheet!

Use tags to track specific expenses like grocery shopping, light bill, water, internet and car fuel.

Do you have a credit card? Track your card balance and installment payments on the spreadsheet.

Anticipate your balance for the next few days with the cash flow from the spreadsheet.

Schedule payment of bills, invoices and monthly payments to avoid surprises!

All this and more on a single annual spreadsheet! Totally free and free ads! Your spreadsheet is stored in Google Drive for more security, privacy, and you can access it from your favorite browser, smartphone or tablet!

Ok! This one is a bit cheating since it’s mine but it still counts, right? Right? Well… This project is a npm module to store your data quickly and without effort. It already has a lot of functionalities such as :

Insert a table

Insert a line

Insert multiple lines

Backup data

Load data

Import data from csv file

Export data in csv file

Search in the database

Search with an index in the database

Sum

Mean

Count

Delete a line

Delete a table

Create an index

And I wish to add more in the future…

Also, it’s way quicker than any other databases. Here’s a quick comparaison with Cassandra, a nosql database.

Yeah! You heard me right, a freaking FPS that you can play on your terminal! Awesome! Even though this one has a bit more than a thousand stars, it’s still close to this, so it makes my list anyway.

Description :

Bring some old-school fun to your terminal! Explore the dungeon and shoot monsters in this pseudo-3D game inspired by the classic Wolfenstein 3D and Doom.

This little gem can normalize a string or remove extra white spaces for you in your python program. Since it’s a new project, I’m sure you’ll see more features coming in the future.

FCP lets you copy files through your network. And… well… it’s way quicker than scp/ssh! According to the README, “on [his] direct ethernet link at home [he] get ~70 MB/s compared to ~20 MB/s with scp.”

Ok, this is the last project of this list. This project is a python framework that has all the most common optimization algorithms without the need to calculate the gradients.

Well… This is already the end of this list.

I will probably write a second part of this article when I’ll have more time and maybe the second part will be less about programming than this one and longer too. I’m genuinely curious about all those github projects that nobody will ever see because the people responsible for it didn’t promote it enough. If you like those projects, make sure to give them stars to show them that you’re interested. And if you know a project (or if you have one) that very few people know, please share it in the comments, I would love to read about it.