A quiet day on GitHub's trending page

We came back empty-handed

Most weeks we go looking for something new and clever to show you. This week our search ran short, and the one page it brought back was GitHub's trending list for R.

At the top sat names like ggplot2 and dplyr. These aren't newcomers. They're long-established tools that people working with data have leaned on for ages. That day, they'd picked up zero or one new star each. Nobody was excited. Nobody needed to be.

Why that's kind of lovely

A trending page shows what's loud, not what's useful. The tools that really hold things up often stop trending because everyone who needs them already has them. They just keep working, quietly, like the oven in a good restaurant.

We didn't want to fill the gap with something half-remembered, so we're not pretending we found a gem. We'll go looking again soon.

Words worth knowing

GitHub: a huge public library where people share and build software together.

Trending page: GitHub's list of projects getting attention right now. Think of it as a busy shop window.

Stars: GitHub's version of a bookmark or a like. Lots of new stars usually means buzz, not necessarily quality.

R: a language people use to crunch numbers and make charts from data.

Something to sit with

Which tools in your business are your ggplot2? The ones nobody talks about, but everything would wobble without them. They might deserve a little more thanks than the shiny new thing.