“Good software is approachable, consistent, explains itself, teaches, and is for humans. “— Mike Bostock

As a UX engineer, I think a lot about the user. When writing software, the wants and needs of the user come first and foremost. However, I often use, contribute to, and write open source software. Open source projects also need to be designed with their users, other developers, in mind.

Previously, I discussed a project aimed at surveying the ways in which software engineers describe their work. The objective is to understand what makes good software by understanding how good software is described. My definition of “good” is highly rated or stared.

I scraped the READMEs of the top 2,000 repositories on GitHub and visualized the words that showed up most frequently. While I am not a data scientist, I frequently work analyzing and visualizing data sets, and want to share the results and discoveries that have come from this project.

For initial results and context, see Open Source Words — Part 3

For more on the extraction and cleanup, see Open Source Words — Part 1