What actually makes someone credible on GitHub over time?

I’m still pretty early in my programming journey, and I’m trying to understand something that GitHub stats don’t really answer.

I’m not looking for a job right now, and I’m not trying to grow followers or collect stars. I want to spend the next few years becoming someone whose work other developers and maintainers can actually trust.

I’ve started contributing to open-source projects and maintaining some projects of my own, but I’m not sure what matters most long term.

For people who have been using GitHub professionally or maintaining open-source projects for years: when you look at someone’s history, what makes you think, “this person is a solid contributor”?

Is it mostly:

staying in one ecosystem for a long time?

getting meaningful PRs merged?

fixing difficult bugs?

participating in reviews and technical discussions?

maintaining something useful yourself?

consistency over several years?

I’m especially interested in what doesn’t help. Are there things younger developers often do because they think it looks impressive, but experienced maintainers actually see as noise?

If you were starting again and had 2–3 years to build real credibility on GitHub, what would you focus on?

So the other day I woke up and one of my projects, Harvey (autonomous sales agent powered by your claude/codex subscription) jumped from 100 to 250 stars overnight. In 3 days its at almost 800 stars. It's getting ~2.5k visitors per day currently with 90% of traffic from Google.

I hadn't touched the project in a while but made sure it was very optimized in the past. So make sure to optimize your repos for organic search!

windows updates break stuff way too often (black screens, audio, remote desktop) and the dumb part is microsoft usually lists the problem publicly. nobody checks that before updating

so i made patchlight. it checks every pending update against microsoft's known issues and gives it a green / yellow / red light. red ones get paused automatically and come back once microsoft fixes them. everything else keeps installing

github.com/G4SBO/PatchLight

lmk what u think, any feedback is appreciated ;)

Hey everyone!
I recently applied for the GitHub Student Developer Pack, but I ran into some issues during the application process.
GitHub asks for location information to help verify my student status, but I’m currently not at my school because it’s on holiday. I also uploaded a picture of my student ID as proof of enrollment, but I blurred out my face for privacy reasons.
When I first clicked the submit button, I got an error message saying that something had gone wrong. So I tried submitting the application again, and this time GitHub told me that my application was currently being processed.
However, I haven’t received any email confirming this, and my GitHub Education dashboard still shows the option to apply instead of indicating that my application is pending.
I’ve already submitted a support ticket to GitHub Education, but I wanted to ask here as well:
Is there anything else I can or should do right now?
Could the application still be processing even though the dashboard doesn’t show a pending status?
How long did it take for GitHub Education Support to respond to your ticket?
I’m really looking forward to using the Student Developer Pack, so I’d appreciate any advice or experiences you can share.
Thanks in advance!

for the record, i don't know shit about how github works and github, yesterday i wanted to install OpenShell to make my windows 11 look like windows 7, the download came in a master file and i don't know how to make it normal. the other branches are the same, i heard something about github reposetories, and looking up i haven't found anyone asking about this.

Reliability issues are driving users away in their droves.

So, I have the GitHub Pro that comes with the education/Student Developers Pack. However, when I try to access codespaces, it says that I've used my budget for the month.

In the education benefits section of the Billing and Licensing drop down in the settings, it says I'm both Verified and Rejected. On that page there is what looks like a progress bar on the Verified and Rejected sections. The Verified is a bit more than half way full (it also says Coupons Applied, but it's in the same area as Verified) and the rejected bar is entirely filled in. I have completed what I need to for the rejected but it hasn't changed. My only other guess is to resubmit an application, but the option to do that is blurred and won't let me resubmit.

I asked my professor and he had no idea. He looked at my usage and said I had barely scratched the surface this month. If you all have any ideas I'd love to hear them. Thank you.

I've noticed that a pull request can have all checks passing, no merge conflicts, and a green status on GitHub.

At first glance, it looks safe to merge. But passing automated checks doesn't necessarily mean someone has reviewed the logic properly or considered how the change affects other parts of the project.

I'm curious how teams use GitHub to avoid this situation.

Do you rely on required approvals, CODEOWNERS, branch protection rules, or GitHub Actions? And which of these has made the biggest difference to your team's review process?

GitHub doesn't really do a great job at all for collaboration.

Imagine you have 5 threads in the overview showing requested changes. After implementing those changes, GitHub shows "Outdated" for the file. But you don't see the applied change line by line.

Now instead of simply scrolling you have to:

* Verify each file by opening it, navigating to the line and see what change has been applied

* Go back to the thread and Collab on it

* Repeat for x changes

How can anyone work with this, really? Why do we need so many clicks just to confirm changes that have been made?

Even if I would wade through single commits, I still have to open the commit, compare files, go back to each thread and answer.

There is no workflow yet that simply...does all this on one page with less clicks?

Does anyone else have an app named "Copilot SWE Agent" among authorized GitHub apps? I've disabled all Copilot and as many AI features as possible, but it keeps coming back after revoking it.

I have Dependabot configured to create PRs in groups/batches, at scheduled times (weekly), and sometimes that works. Most of the time I'm getting multiple individual PRs opened at arbitrary times.

If I were only maintaining a single project, I could live with that. But because of multiple PRs and me maintaining so many things, I've seen over 200 PRs in a day. With tests, updating every time another PR merges, tests running again, deploy previews (Netlify, so this costs for build times), and production deploys when merged, it's just way too much!

Does anyone else have this issue? Or has anyone figured out how to get all the updates at once on a fixed schedule (I'd allow a critical security update outside of the schedule)? Because I'm starting to seriously consider ditching it. It's just annoying at this point.

So with the recent UI update, I no longer am able to see the logs for a completed step or an in progress step, it just shows "This job succeeded" for a completed one or a black box for in progress. How do I get the old UI back? We run terraform through GH actions, and I am now not able to monitor my applies or see plan output through GH actions.

I want to report an irregularity regarding an adult content website (sex store) that lacks an age filter, but my account has my name on it and I don't want my personal information to be seen.

Title:

Body:

I'm learning GitHub Actions and have set up a self-hosted runner inside an Ubuntu Docker container on my Windows machine.

My workflow uses actions/setup-java to install Java 17:

- name: Set up JDK 17
  uses: actions/setup-java@v4
  with:
    java-version: '17'
    distribution: 'temurin'
    cache: maven

However, the job gets stuck at the Set up JDK 17 step. The logs stop at:

Resolved latest version as 17.0.20+101
JDK cache is not found for Temurin-Hotspot 17.0.20+101
Trying to download...
Downloading Java 17.0.20+101 (Temurin-Hotspot) ...

I tested the download URL manually from inside the container using curl. The download repeatedly stops before completion and returns:

curl: (18) Transferred a partial file

I also tried resuming the download with curl -C - and retry options, but it failed again. A basic connectivity test to https://github.com returns HTTP 200.

The runner itself appears to be connected and running jobs correctly. I haven't yet confirmed whether the issue is related to the network, the GitHub release download redirect, a proxy, or something else.

My questions:

1. What could cause curl: (18) Transferred a partial file to occur repeatedly when downloading a large release asset?
2. How can I identify whether the problem is caused by my network, a redirect destination, a proxy, or the download server?
3. Is there a recommended way to configure actions/setup-java on a Docker-based self-hosted runner to avoid this issue?

I'd appreciate any troubleshooting steps or suggestions. Thanks!

Hi.

I can’t email Github.

had anyone had the issue that “email domain could not be verified“ pops up after they put their email in?

I don’t want to use another email.
it s a hotmail. Does anyone have a solution to this?

If you have been pushing hundreds of PRs every day with coding agents and finishing your GitHub Actions quota, I built this CI cost simulator for you.

https://celesto.ai/ci

When I try to add an emoji to my status, the app immediately closes the emoji selection menu.

I’m not a computer guy and apparently resetting my password doesn’t work cause passwords no longer supported and I guess my old ip was trusted or something cause I just moved house and didn’t know that meant I cant get into my fkn GitHub so I can update 1 god forsaken file for a RICS repo .. all the “help” I’ve found tells me to go into dev settings to set up a Tokken or a SSH KEY and to put it frank I HAVE NO F’ing CLUE WHAT THAT MEANS!!! Nor can I log into it to get to where the settings section is located to be able to get or change or activate the friggin token or things it’s saying I need now!?

I don’t know what this git pull or push or whatever it is and there doesn’t seem to be any other options.

Best part now I have a second login for whatever damn reason and now when I try to switch to my offical acc it just keeps logging me in as the stupid second acc it’s INFURIATING to put it lightly..

Why even have a password rest thing if it’s not gonna bloody work???

Can someone explain what it is I need to do to get into my GitHub.. in Laymans terms ?

If not can someone push this through to a GitHub feedback place cause rn I’m just getting advised from some friends to just make a new one and fork the repo again as it’ll be faster but I don’t like the idea that it’s better to do that each time leaving a trail of half baked GitHub’s rather than just fixing the one I need 💁‍♂️

Github seems to be suffering from yet another outage. I can't seem to open any file from any repository.

Anyone else experiencing the same? I wonder if it's something local or not.

(Location: Netherlands)

Only GitHub Actions here, not AWS or other cloud bills.

Mine is tiny: a few dollars a month, almost all from test runs I do on purpose. So I don't feel this cost myself, and I'd like to know how it looks for real teams.

If your company pays GitHub for Actions:

- Roughly what is the bill per month?

- Does anyone look at it, and how often?

- Has it ever caused a real problem? A surprise jump, a question from finance, jobs stopped because the budget ran out? Or is it too small next to everything else to matter?

Rough numbers are fine. "It's tiny and nobody cares" is a useful answer too.

I'm a solo developer building a small tool in this area, so I'd rather learn the real numbers than guess. No link.

I recently started using GIthub as part of my hobbie with GPT and codex. For years before i used github i just synced my folder with google drive. When i started using github i didnt think anything of it but randomly i mentioned that in a GPT chat and now i am down a rabbit hole of robocopy + nas + task scheduler.

When GPT said it was bad i started ask about alternative setups and what i wanted was still some system that worked similar to google drive with file revisions and all the niceties.

I let GPT lead me around with all sort of idea and since i dont want more third party programs I am now trying to setup robocopy -> NAS, then NAS -> a cloud provider with CLI scripts.

I am wondering since i am new to this somewhat and i dont know what i dont know.

Is there a simpler solution that is somewhat hands off?
I thought about just trying to be mindful and pausing sync when i want to do codex work or change branches but that is a habit that would take time and may never form.

I am open to ideas and workflows if anyone is willing to share.

Ok, I'm wondering about good backup services and stratagems for two disaster cases. Having a git-clone on a backup disk is a first step, but I'm not certain of exactly what data is missed by this. Any suggestions for a way to survive cases like the ones below?

1. Assume that somehow your entire github account gets mangled somehow and you want a complete backup of everything (repos, history, branches, bug tracking, lfs...etc) that can be restored to a fresh github site. Ie: a complete replica of everything. What do you use?

2. Assume that through some disaster, all of github is completely wiped out and no longer available and you want a backup that could be restored to some other source control system (perforce...etc) preserving as much of the github information and history as possible. What then?

Anyone else experiencing intermittent outages with github today? I am routinely getting the unicorn error page.

The offiicial x account and also the status page do not indicate an outage.