Finding inspiration on GitHub

You can find inspiration for your own projects and learning on GitHub and connect with a community.

In this article

Introduction

GitHub is a vast open-source community. You can explore GitHub to find interesting repositories, topics, code, people, and organizations that can inspire your own work, or support your own learning.

Once you've found something that interests you, you can:

  • Star the repository or topic, so you can easily find it again later.
  • Follow people or organizations, so you can stay updated on their activities.
  • Download useful repositories or code, and customize it for your own use.
  • Contribute to another user's project, by opening a pull request.

Once you star repositories or follow people, you will see updates on their activities on your personal dashboard.

Visit Explore GitHub

  1. Navigate to Explore GitHub.
  2. Browse popular repositories and topics.
  3. Click Star next to repositories and topics that interest you, so you can easily find them again later.
  4. Navigate to your stars page to see all your starred repositories and topics.

Search for a topic or project on GitHub

  1. Navigate to https://github.com/search.
  2. Type a keyword or query into the search bar. For example, try "how to build a webpage", or "skills-course". For more detailed information on how to search GitHub for specific topics, repositories, or code, see About searching on GitHub.
  3. Use the left sidebar to filter the results. For example, to browse all repositories in the "skills-course" topic, search "skills-course", then filter by "Topic".
  4. Star the repositories that match your interests.

Following people and organizations on GitHub

Following people and organizations on GitHub is another good way to stay updated on projects and topics that interest you.

Following people

  1. Navigate to the user's profile page.
  2. Under the user's profile picture, click Follow.
  3. Optionally, to unfollow a user, click Unfollow.

Following organizations

  1. Navigate to the organization page you want to follow.

  2. In the top-right corner, click Follow.

    Screenshot of @octo-org's profile page. A button, labeled "Follow", is outlined in dark orange.

  3. Optionally, to unfollow an organization, click Unfollow.

Next steps

  • GitHub has a great support community where you can ask for help and talk to people from around the world. Join the conversation on GitHub Community.
  • In the next tutorial, Downloading files from GitHub, you'll learn how to download files from GitHub for your own use, and learn the differences between downloading, cloning, and forking repositories.

Further reading