Last month I launched two open source projects on GitHub. A few days later, my Front-End Checklist was showing more than 6,000 stars (17,000 as of writing). And I got 600 stars for my Resources-Front-End-Beginner project!

It was unexpected for me to receive such support coming from so many people around the globe: USA, Brazil, China, Japan, France, Canada, Spain, Mauritius, Japan, Portugal... Even now, I still can’t believe how many pull requests I received with changes and corrections these last days.

For so long I received gifts from the open source world. Now I felt it was finally time for me to give back everything I have learned, and to help others.

As a professional Front-End manager, I spend my time teaching and encouraging others to learn and practice. I regularly share interesting content and useful tools on the Front-End Dev Mauritius group (if you are not in Mauritius, you can still join the Front-End Coders Global Group) on Facebook. But I never planned that the Front-End Checklist will become a worldwide project.

My motivations to write another Front-End checklist

I’ve seen some Front-End checklists over the past year on the web:

Some of them helped me years ago when I wanted to improve my Front-End knowledge, but most of them were just “not enough.”

Two years ago, I decided to start writing my own checklist based on my experiences. That checklist became way more important when I started to manage Front-End teams in France and Mauritius. Based on questions and usual mistakes from the teams, the content kept improving.

When I needed to teach someone how to become a better Front-End developer, I always had in mind that checklist that I started to work on. The document which started with a simple personal need became an ambitious tool for my team.

Then I started to feel the need to share it with more people.

A month ago I decided to put a first version on GitHub. And… at that moment, everything started to happen fast… really fast.

Things can happen fast on the internet. Really fast.

On 18 October, I published the first version of my Front-End Checklist. I went to see all members of my team and I asked them to put a star 😀 on the repository. They don’t really have the habit to star projects on Github, I had to encourage them to do so 😂.

A few hours later, watching an episode of Hawaii Five-O with my wife, I opened my GitHub repository on my iPad. I was shocked to find that in only few hours, I had already received 700 stars.

700 stars on Github in only few hours

I was not able to understand why and where these stars were coming from. (At that time, I didn’t know about the Insights > Traffic section on GitHub.)

I hadn’t even published any tweet about the Github repository. The next day, I published on my Twitter account: just few likes and retweets about the checklist. Nothing that may explain, where everyone was coming from.

I then started to validate pull requests and answer some logged issues. I was feeling so grateful for that unimaginable support. Even working daily with international websites, I forgot sometimes the power of Internet. (Or it’s maybe I’m living in a small island far from everything 😂.)

Next day, I received on Twitter a message from Product Hunt:

Without really taking time to think, I opened my Illustrator and designed a logo to put on the page. I kept it basic, inspired by the logo of Front-End Coders, a future NGO I’ll be launching soon officially.