Github Trending is Cool

2019-12-14

As a pseudo-Christmas present, a dear friend of mine gave me my first
mechanical keyboard. Naturally, I'm now looking for all sorts of things to
type, just so I can hear the clicky-clacky sounds that I find so satisfying. If
you're wondering, the box says "60% Anne" and that the switches are brown. I
don't really understand what that means---other than that it indicates the size
and switch clickiness---but I'm enjoying it all the same.

One benefit of being prompted to type more things may be that I post more stuff
here than usual. One minor problem is that this may also result in stuff that's
poorly-planned and short. To this I say *meh*, as well as
*clickity-clack-clack*.

Just yesterday, for some reason I decided to browse [Github
Trending](https://github.com/trending), which I have pretty much never done. My
goodness, what a wonderful collection of code. All sorts of interesting
projects seem to show up there, and the majority of them have permissive
licenses, in addition to being open source. I thought I had a good idea of the
number of meaningful open source projects, but I can see now that there is much
more out there than I had imagined. I certainly don't mind being wrong. If you
care about code, give Trending a look.

Here are a few repositories I starred while browsing Trending. Perhaps you'll
find them interesting, as I do.

- [Huginn](https://github.com/huginn/huginn) is more or less self-hosted IFTTT.
  A simple idea, to be sure, but beautifully-executed, to my eye. There already
appear to be lots of "agents" available that talk to various other services. I
suppose you have to set up API keys with some of these external services
yourself, but once you get it all working, I suspect that Huginn more than
returns the time investment. Plus, what a cool way to frame the problem and
solution; Huginn is the name of one of the two ravens that sit on Odin's
shoulders and report whatever they see back to him. I will definitely be
setting this up on my server soon, and it may even push me to learn some Ruby
so I can write my own agents.
- [Public Pentesting
  Reports](https://github.com/juliocesarfort/public-pentesting-reports) is a
repository containing just that. I've only browsed this a little, but I can
already see that this is a good collection of security-related information.
These seem to be copies of reports that are generated by actual penetration
testing firms, and since they're meant to teach the companies that hired them
how to fix their systems, they naturally inform any reader to the techniques
and tricks used by the penetration testers. I plan to cozy up with a few of
these at some point, perhaps even hard copies, and read through them over some
tea.
- [Rustlings](https://github.com/rust-lang/rustlings) is a companion repository
  for [The Rust Book](https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/index.html), a sort of
online textbook introduction to Rust. Some time ago, I spent a few hours going
through the first chapters of The Rust Book, but I got a little bored by the
technical detail. Had I known that this repository existed---or perhaps though
to search for it---I may have continued and become a power Rustacean. (That's
what they're called, right?) Anyway, in my surely limitless spare time I hope
to eventually learn some useful Rust, and these exercises may help me to do
just that.

So yeah, Github Trending. If you need to kill two (or two hundred) hours and
like code, look no further.