This is a submission for the 2025 Hacktoberfest Writing Challenge: Maintainer Spotlight
🌍 Introducing react-native-body-highlighter
react-native-body-highlighter is a React Native component that allows you to display and highlight interactive human body parts. It’s a simple yet powerful tool for apps in sports, fitness, health, and education.
Today, it’s being used in TeamBuildr, an Athletes apps & tools ecosystem trusted by NBA, NFL, NHL, and Premier League professional coaches to annotate injuries, track recovery, visualize training, etc. Yes — your Hacktoberfest contributions could end up in the hands of pro coaches working with world-class athletes .
✨ The Unexpected Journey Behind the Repo
This project started in a very different place. A few years ago, I built a personal workout-tracking app — the kind many fitness enthusiasts dream of making at least once. I built it from scratch: all the features, all the UI, all the code. But like many passion projects, it fizzled out:
- No marketing strategy.
- Weak UI/UX.
- Too much time spent coding and not enough validating.
The app disappeared, but one piece of it stuck: the code to highlight muscle groups for each exercise. Instead of letting it rot, I decided to make it a public GitHub repo — and so react-native-body-highlighter was born.
Fast forward: I recently discovered through its forks that this tiny component is now integrated into professional sports apps. What started as leftover code from a failed app is now used daily by coaches training some of the best athletes in the world. That’s the magic of open source.
🤝 How to Contribute
This Hacktoberfest, I’d love to welcome new contributors to help grow react-native-body-highlighter. There’s so much potential for this library to become even more useful.
Right now, there are already 10+ open issues ready for the community to tackle but feel free to open new issues (I’ll be creating more in the upcoming days to make sure everyone who wants to contribute has a way in).
Here is the simple process to follow:
1- Answer to the issue "I will work on this issue"
2- Fork the repo
3- Create a new branch and push your code
4- Create a pull request and add the issue link in the description
Congratulation, you've contributed to an open source repo :)
🎉 The Power of Community
Open source often starts small — sometimes as code you wrote for yourself, sometimes as a side project that didn’t “make it.” But once shared, it can take on a life of its own. I’m humbled and grateful to every contributor and user who has helped grow this library into something useful far beyond what I imagined.
So, if you want your Hacktoberfest contributions to reach professional sports coaches, elite athletes, and beyond, this is your chance to make an impact.
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