Achievements

After celebrating open source feats and milestones such as NASA’s Ingenuity flight on Mars and the Arctic Code Vault, GitHub wanted to explicitly acknowledge the milestones and ongoing journey of the developer community. Achievements introduced the framework that celebrates first times, rare events, impressive accomplishments, and even the [humorous] accidents of building software.

Lists

Repository stars are one of the core social features of GitHub and performs several jobs. Stars allow users to bookmark repositories and doubles as a popularity metric; by showing up in the activity feed, `stars` also strengthens the experience for repository discovery. Lists added functionality on top of Stars by allowing users organize their starred repositories into different lists. This unburdened Starring from needing to perform so many jobs and was received enthusiastically by the GitHub community. Over 1 million lists were created within a year of launch.

Sign up redesign

GitHub wanted to completely rethink and restyle the tone of joining GitHub. I got to lead design on refreshing the sign up flow to reflect the optimistic, developer-centric of GitHub’s new landing experience. The terminal-style UI actually helped some folks feel like they were a developer; this sentiment aligned with GitHub's brand. Anthony and I collaborated on this; he brought in the motion and stars!

Upvotes in Discussions

Bobby and I were pulled in to work on upvotes within Discussions ahead of a broader public launch. We designed upvotes to help surface important conversations, directing attention to the most high impact discussions without adding burden to maintainers.

Profile README

User profiles were largely structured around repositories and contribution activity, with little room for self-expression or creativity. READMEs were already ubiquitous on repositories and provided a customizable cover page for open source projects. After we shared a rough spike on Twitter, the overwhelming engagement got us building quickly. This feature was shipped as a whimsical secret and enjoyed an enthusiastic response from the community. This is my favorite project because it enabled so many funny, personal, and truly creative displays. A year later, 1.9 million READMEs had been created and 9.5 million unique users had viewed a README.

Sponsorship Goals

After Sponsors for Organizations came out of beta, I worked on an update that gave users the option to to set a sponsors or sponsorship goal.

Sponsors for Organizations

After collaborating with Kat on GitHub Sponsors, I returned to help bring this program to organizations on GitHub. I led design and onboarding for organizations participating in the beta ahead of a broader public launch.

"Memex"

As my time on experimental projects ended, I was asked to design and pitch a new vision for project management on GitHub. Once the foundation was shaped, I was given a option to work on OSS products, which I eagerly took.

Experiments

I was very fortunate to work on some experiments within GitHub. This was a huge growing year for me in terms of learning how to scope, sequence, and socialize ideas within a large organization. These projects did not ship, but did later influence code workflow products at GitHub. Thank you, thank yoouuu, Max, for giving me this opportunity.