Awesome is the original “awesome list”: Sindre Sorhus’s 2014 catalog of technology-related curated lists, which spawned an entire genre. Star this repo and you have a table of contents to the rest of the awesome-* ecosystem: awesome-python, awesome-nodejs, awesome-go, awesome-react, and a few hundred more, each maintained by community experts.
- 488,962 stars
- 36,057 forks
- Curated link index
- CC0 / public domain dedication
Awesome: The root of an entire pattern
“Awesome” became a genre name because of this repo. The format (a single README, organized by sub-topic, every entry a real curated link with a one-line description, no padding) got copied into thousands of domain-specific siblings. Today there’s an awesome-list for almost every language, framework, tool, and non-software topic. This repo is the canonical entry point: it lists the best of those siblings, and you click through to the one for your stack.
What’s actually in it
The list is roughly: Platforms (Node.js, iOS, Android, Cloud, Linux), Programming Languages (every popular language has an awesome-X sibling), Front-End Development, Back-End Development, Computer Science (algorithms, AI, learning), Big Data, Theory, Books, Editors, Entertainment, Databases, Media, Learn, Management, Work, Networking, Decentralized Systems, Higher Education, Events, Testing, Miscellaneous, Related. Each entry is a link to a sibling awesome-list, not a direct resource.
Quality bar, and how it’s enforced
Sindre enforces an actual style guide: an awesome list must have a description, be on GitHub, be at least a year old, not be a personal README, not have a license that prevents reuse, and several other rules. Lists that fail review get PR’d out. This is why the awesome-* ecosystem has stayed higher-quality than competing “curated” formats: the root list refuses to point at low-effort children.
The personal upsell
The README’s hero image is a promotion for Sindre’s macOS app, Supercharge. It’s an honest upsell. He maintains Awesome and dozens of widely-used npm packages largely unpaid. If the promotion bothers you, scroll past it; the actual content is below.
Awesome is the index of curated lists. Bookmark it as the entry point when you want a high-signal index of any technology area: it points to the best sibling list, which points to the actual resources.