The trendy five: Fall favorites from GitHub in November 2018

The days are certainly getting shorter and colder, but that just means we have more time to warm ourselves next to GitHub’s hottest repos. November was full of excitement for GitHub – GitHub Desktop 1.5 was released, completing the merge collaboration cycle. Plus, we took a good look at this innovative community during out tech history series.

Every month, we scour the GitHub trending page for repos that stand out from the crowd. We choose five of the most innovative, interesting, and well-thought out projects to highlight in our monthly report. As always, it was tough to narrow down the list of GitHub repos to our five favorites.

So, without further ado, here are our top picks (in no particular order)!

Dive

Dive is a tool for exploring a Docker image. Developers can layer contents, making it possible to shrink their Docker image size. Make your Docker images more efficient with Dive’s quick build and analysis cycles!

Although this project is still in the beta phase, it offers a lot of features for developers. They can show Docker image contents broken down by layer; when a layer is selected, Dive explores the contents of that layer with all the previous layers. It indicates what’s been changed in those layers, including any modifications or removals to any specific layer or the aggregated changes to this point.

Importantly, Dive estimates the “image efficiency” of any given image with a percentage score and total wasted file space. The experimental metric guesses how much wasted space your image contains from duplicated files or files that haven’t been removed properly.

More information about Dive is available here.

Firecracker

Firecracker provides secure and fast microVMs for serverless computing. More specifically, it’s a visualization technology that is designed to create and manage multi-tenant containers and functions-based services.

Essentially, Firecracker runs workloads in lightweight virtual machines called microVMs. By doing so, it provides developers with both the security and isolation properties provided by hardware virtualization technology as well as the speed and flexibility of containers. Firecracker’s virtual machine monitor uses the Linux Kernal Machine (KVM) to create and run these microVMs.

With a minimalist design, Firecracker’s lightweight footprint improves startup speed and reduces the attack surface of the microVM. Right now, it supports Intel’s CPUs, with future support planned for AMD and ARM as well as other popular container runtimes.

More information about Firecracker is available here.

DeOldify

Make black and white photos a thing of the past with DeOldify, a Deep Learning based project for colorizing and restoring old images. There’s no need to painstakingly colorize old photos with Photoshop now that deep learning is on the case!

Samurais, circa 1860s. Source: DeOldify.

Paris in the 1880s. Source: DeOldify.

This innovative project brings the past back to life by combining several deep learning approaches: a self-attention generative adversarial network, progressive growing of GANs, a two time-scale update rule, generator loss, and a lot of hard work. While it’s initially being used for colorization, future efforts are being spent on trying to sharpen faded images.

Try out DeOldify yourself on CoLab!

NES.css

NES.css is a NES-style(8bit-like) CSS Framework. Suitable for both English and Japanese users, NES.css brings a certain 90s Nintendo style to your developing. There’s no need for JavaScript, either!

NES.css only provides components for developers to plug into their own layouts. It’s compatible with Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. No gold coins are necessary, either; this project is open source and freely available.

Head on over to the preview page to see how your life could look like with the NES.css format added to your project!

React

Okay, so this isn’t exactly a new project for us. But, given how important the FB market is, it’s important to have React down. React is a declarative, efficient, and flexible JavaScript library for building user interfaces.

React helps developers create interactive UIs with more predictable and easier to debug code. It’s component based, which means that developers can build encapsulated components that manage their own state and make complex UIs.

Find out more information about React.js here.