This Open-Source Newsletter Has Run Every Month for a Decade
A website has published on the 28th of every month, without missing one, for ten years straight — that’s what HelloGitHub does: dig up interesting, entry-level open-source projects on GitHub and package them into a monthly issue for readers. Started as a personal project in May 2016, the GitHub repository behind it has since racked up 172,100 stars and 12,600 forks, making it one of the go-to spots in the Chinese-speaking dev world for finding fun open-source projects.
What It Actually Does
HelloGitHub’s positioning is simple, and its own tagline says it plainly: “Interest is the best teacher — HelloGitHub helps you find the joy of open source.” The site’s main navigation is split into Home, Periodical, Rankings, and Articles, with content sortable by “Latest,” “Monthly,” or “Yearly,” and filterable by “Featured” or “All.” In other words, it isn’t a platform trying to systematically teach you a programming language — it solves one specific pain point: there are too many projects on GitHub to sift through, most developers don’t have time to do that filtering themselves, and HelloGitHub is the one doing a first pass of that filtering for you.
How the Monthly Issue Works: The 28th, Every Time, No Exceptions
The core product is that monthly issue. Take the latest, Issue 124, published on July 28, 2026: content is organized by programming language, with separate sections for C, Go, Python, and others. This issue included 86Box, a retro PC emulator that simulates early systems like DOS and Windows 98; simplewall, a lightweight, ad-free Windows network firewall tool; JoltPhysics, described as the physics engine behind Death Stranding 2; karakeep, a self-hostable bookmark manager with AI-powered auto-tagging; and an open-source Chinese-language book, Understanding AI Agents: Design Principles and Engineering Practice. Covering everything from a retro emulator to an AI book in the same issue says a lot about the newsletter’s curation logic: it doesn’t care about category, only whether something’s interesting.
Beyond 86Box, simplewall, JoltPhysics, karakeep, and the AI Agent book, Issue 124’s Go section included zabbix, an enterprise-grade distributed monitoring platform, and kage, a tool that packages an entire website into an offline folder; the Python section included msgspec, a faster serialization library, and wenyi, a tool built specifically for keeping consistency in long-form novel translation. The sheer range within a single issue — emulators, security tools, game physics engines, AI books, monitoring systems, translation tools — helps explain what “entry-level” actually means here: every project comes with a plain-language description or two, so you don’t need domain expertise to understand what it does.
The Scale Behind 172,000 Stars
According to live data from the GitHub repository, HelloGitHub currently has 172,100 stars, 12,600 forks, 5,300 watchers, and 617 issues opened cumulatively. The project is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, and its sponsor list includes companies like UCloud and OpenIM. The site’s own source code is open too, hosted in a separate repository, HelloGitHub-Team/geese; beyond reading the monthly issue, readers can keep up through its WeChat official account, Weibo account, or RSS feed.
One Account, Ten Years
The maintainer’s GitHub handle is “521xueweihan,” and the project was their personal initiative launched in May 2016 — which puts it at almost exactly a decade old by now. Compared to the many open-source “awesome list” projects that flare up and fade out, what makes HelloGitHub distinctive may not be how many projects it’s catalogued, but the rhythm of showing up on schedule, every month, for ten years without missing a beat. The issues aren’t sourced from the maintainer alone, either — both the website and the GitHub repository are open to reader nominations and self-submissions, which makes the newsletter, in a sense, something the whole Chinese-speaking open-source community curates together.
Why This Site Is Worth Knowing About
If you’re a developer wondering “is there already a tool for this,” or a beginner still building a mental model of what open-source projects even look like, HelloGitHub offers a relatively low-barrier entry point — instead of hunting through GitHub search results yourself, there’s a fresh, pre-filtered, briefly-annotated batch of projects to browse every month. Compared to algorithm-driven tech media, this model — human-curated, monthly, unchanged for a decade — is, if anything, unusual in an era of information overload.
