DEV Community: Julian Li

New on Trendshift: Stats Page for Open-Source Language Trends

Julian Li — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 09:41:46 +0000

Just shipped a new Stats page on Trendshift → https://trendshift.io/stats

You can now explore:

📊 Charts showing programming language trends across captured repositories

✨ Cleaner UI and better readability

🔍 A data-driven way to explore what developers are actually building

Further releases

With the impact of AI, are open-source creators still motivated?
Does the community still have momentum to share ideas and projects?

I’m planning to build more features this year to explore these questions and share deeper ecosystem insights.

Would love your feedback 🙌
https://trendshift.io/stats

New repository engagements page on trendshift.io

Julian Li — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 22:45:42 +0000

I launched trendshift.io in 2023 as a tool to help discover popular repositories and learn from projects featured on GitHub Trending. Over time, however, I found it increasingly difficult to find the most interesting and newest projects using the existing pages, as they no longer met my evolving expectations.

Some challenges

Many great open source projects repeatedly appear on GitHub Trending, but I need a way to surface repositories I haven’t come across yet.

Some repositories once trended and were actively maintained for a period before gradually losing momentum. I want to quickly assess whether a repository is still popular, continues to receive contributions, and is actively maintained.

Technology evolves rapidly. Sometimes I simply want to find projects created within the last five years, the past year, or even just the last few months.

The "Repository Engagements" Page

To address these needs, I’ve launched a new page: Repository Engagements.

trendshift.io now continuously pulls data from GitHub and stores the monthly activity of tracked repositories. Including stars, forks, merged PRs, issues and closed issues. You can now view the top 10 repositories each month based on selected filters, including the option to only show repositories created after a specified date. This provides a quick overview of the most active, popular, or newly created repositories featured on GitHub Trending each month.

Additionally, every repository tracked in the database now features a Monthly Activity Chart on its detail page. This makes it easy to understand a project's engagement over time and determine whether it remains relevant, popular, and actively maintained.

And that's not all the features

I do have a few more ideas that I’m excited to build:

I don’t need to explore every repository on trendshift.io, but I would like to group or bookmark certain repositories so I can follow them more easily. It would be even better if I could write notes or record my own thoughts about these open source projects.

A more comprehensive search feature: how about a page that allows searching all recorded trending repositories using custom filters? Perhaps we could even save those filters and use them to build a personalised dashboard.

A way to quickly compare different repositories, especially when deciding which packages to use.

Can’t wait to share more. Happy digging: https://trendshift.io/repository-engagements

GitHub Trending Insight

Julian Li — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 08:00:33 +0000

GitHub Trending is a great place to explore popular repositories. However, I sometimes feel frustrated because it doesn't provide an API for accessing historical data. That's why I created this website GitHub Trending Insight, which captures daily data from GitHub Trending."

Now we can

Get some insights based on historical data.
Know the most popular repositories among the trending repositories by different filters.
Embed the trending repository badge in the repository README or your website. (For example, https://trendshift.io/repositories/204 -> click Embed badge)
Search trending repositories and view the history of their rankings.

TODOs

I will focus on the following items, and then I will consider the MVP done:

Trending Developers and Developer Badge
Branding

The source code

I use Nextjs for the frontend work and Go as the backend language. I made those repositories public, feel free to raise issues or send me PRs.

https://github.com/liweiyi88/trendshift
https://github.com/liweiyi88/trendshift-backend

Lastly, I hope you enjoy this site and have some fun!

Database backup with onedump

Julian Li — Wed, 08 Feb 2023 04:11:22 +0000

Onedump is a CLI tool for database backup. It supports database dump from multiple sources( MySQL or PostgreSQL database) and stores it in your preferred storage (Local, S3, Google Drive or Dropbox). It is easy to use and manage, basically, it is just a simple command with a single configuration.

Motivation

Before I started to implement this tool, I asked myself why I need to create another tool for database backup again. Although there might have had some tools that did a good job with database backup, I rarely found one that fit my needs:

I need a tool to dump MySQL and PostgreSQL databases to different storage with a simple command and a single configuration file. I need this tool not only to be able to dump databases directly via the network (if possible) but also to dump via SSH (if possible).

I want it to be fast to back up databases, concurrently if possible.

I want it to be easy to configure, one configuration file is the goal.

I prefer to store my configuration file in a secure location, ideally with encryption at rest.

The tool

To resolve my own requirements, as shown above, I am glad that I have delivered the tool and run it for the backup of all my side project databases. I will be more joyful if it helps other people who have similar needs. For more details like how to use it, here is the instruction