There is a lot of great stuff on Github but it's hard to know where to start looking. I'm wondering if HN had any recommendations for useful tool suites or other noteworthy projects.
Just in case you missed it, we have an "Explore GitHub" page that should get you started with some repos that you may not have heard of before:<p><a href="https://github.com/explore" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/explore</a>
Not sure how obscure these would be here (I first learned about them on Hacker News), but I've found Backbone.js and Underscore.js to be extraordinary projects.<p>Links:<p><a href="http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/" rel="nofollow">http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/</a><p><a href="http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/" rel="nofollow">http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/</a>
<a href="http://thechangelog.com/" rel="nofollow">http://thechangelog.com/</a> is a great blog to follow for interesting GitHub projects, it also powers parts of the "Explore GitHub" page that @mojombo mentioned.
I've really enjoyed skimming through other users 'dotfiles' or similarly named repos. It's a great way to find some small tips or shortcuts to make my day to day work more efficient, etc, without reading a long blog post about why some technique is the 'only sane, correct, right, proper way' and you'd have to be crazy to try anything else. I.e. great tips without the commentary.
The latest one I discovered is Slidedown: a simple tool to generate HTML slides (with syntax highlighting) from a markdown document.<p>Came in handy when I had to whip up a presentation for a recent meetup.
I'm a big fan of zen coding, it's a way of writing HTML and CSS by shortcuts and expanding them, cross-IDE: <a href="https://github.com/sergeche/zen-coding" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/sergeche/zen-coding</a> it has sped up my html writing considerably.<p>If you're using Django with a MySQL heavy application, consider django-stored-procedures (written by a colleague of mine) <a href="https://github.com/jeroeng/stored-procedures" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jeroeng/stored-procedures</a>
Gordon;
An open source Flash™ runtime written in pure JavaScript<p>EXAMPLE: <a href="http://paulirish.com/work/gordon/demos/" rel="nofollow">http://paulirish.com/work/gordon/demos/</a>
GIT: <a href="https://github.com/tobeytailor/gordon" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/tobeytailor/gordon</a>
qlmarkdown. It enables OS X to show (pretty/formatted) Markdown documents in Quick Look.<p>I also forked something called Add-Another for replicating parts of web forms (when you need to collect 0-n things from a user, e.g. emergency contacts, images, etc.)
AppSales-Mobile to an amazing and well supported find to track your iOS app sales. <a href="https://github.com/omz/AppSales-Mobile" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/omz/AppSales-Mobile</a><p>On the Mac Brotherbard's Gitx fork is very cool. <a href="https://github.com/brotherbard/gitx" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/brotherbard/gitx</a><p>GitFlow - takes your Git skills to the next level.
<a href="https://github.com/nvie/gitflow" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/nvie/gitflow</a>
I found isaac to be pretty cool. I had to fork it and add features because it's not maintained too well, but a neat idea.<p><a href="https://github.com/ichverstehe/isaac" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ichverstehe/isaac</a>
<a href="http://github.com/rohityadav/cmakeqt" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/rohityadav/cmakeqt</a>
a qt-cmake example, with features like cross compiling, packaging, translations etc.
self-plug: GithubFinder <a href="http://sr3d.github.com/GithubFinder" rel="nofollow">http://sr3d.github.com/GithubFinder</a><p>Much better code/repo browsing for Github repos, especially with the bookmarklet or the Userscript plugin.
libtelnet: A nifty little library that makes it easy to speak proper telnet.<p><a href="https://github.com/elanthis/libtelnet" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/elanthis/libtelnet</a>
What.js<p><a href="https://github.com/entmike/What" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/entmike/What</a> -- I've been playing with this, written by a buddy of mine. It's a Node.js-based application server, complete with an HttpServlet implementation.