Most-followed developers on GitHub
A curated list of the individual developers with the largest followings on GitHub, what each of them built, and what their profiles reveal about different kinds of engineering careers.
| # | Developer | Known for |
|---|---|---|
| 1 |
Linus Torvalds
@torvalds
|
Linux and Git. The most consequential two projects one person has started. |
| 2 |
Evan You
@yyx990803
|
Vue.js and Vite. Proved independent open source could be funded directly. |
| 3 |
Dan Abramov
@gaearon
|
Redux, Create React App, and years on the React core team. |
| 4 |
Sindre Sorhus
@sindresorhus
|
Over a thousand npm packages, maintained full time. |
| 5 |
Ryan Dahl
@ry
|
Created Node.js, then rebuilt the idea as Deno a decade later. |
| 6 |
shadcn
@shadcn
|
shadcn/ui - changed how React teams distribute components. |
| 7 |
Anthony Fu
@antfu
|
Vite and Vue core, UnoCSS, and a long catalogue of build tooling. |
| 8 |
Kent C. Dodds
@kentcdodds
|
Testing Library, and a large body of teaching material. |
| 9 |
Taylor Otwell
@taylorotwell
|
Laravel, and a sustainable business built around it. |
| 10 |
George Hotz
@geohot
|
comma.ai and tinygrad. Minimal implementations of complex systems. |
Follower counts on GitHub are a strange metric. They are not a measure of code quality, and they are not really a measure of influence either - plenty of profoundly important maintainers have modest followings because their work sits in infrastructure that few people interact with directly.
What follower counts do track reasonably well is reach: how many developers have encountered this person’s work closely enough to want to know what they do next. That makes the list a decent starting point for anyone trying to understand the shape of modern open source.
A few things worth noticing as you look through these profiles.
Influence and activity are different things
Several developers near the top of any follower ranking are not especially active right now. Jeremy Ashkenas wrote Backbone.js and CoffeeScript, both of which shaped front-end JavaScript for years and both of which have since been superseded - partly by ideas they introduced. Chris Wanstrath co-founded GitHub itself.
Their contribution graphs are quiet. Their influence is not. If you are using a GitHub profile to evaluate someone, this is the first correction to make: a sparse recent graph tells you about the last twelve months, not about what a person is capable of.
Two very different profile shapes
Compare Sindre Sorhus with Evan You.
Sorhus maintains over a thousand packages, most of them small and single-purpose. His stars are distributed across hundreds of repositories, and no single project dominates. Evan You’s profile is almost the inverse: a handful of repositories, two of which - Vue and Vite - carry enormous star counts and sit underneath a large share of the JavaScript ecosystem.
Both are legitimate and highly successful open-source careers. They look nothing alike on a profile page. Any evaluation framework that rewards one shape and penalises the other is measuring the wrong thing.
The educators
Kent C. Dodds, and outside this list Wes Bos and Brad Traversy, accumulate followers primarily through teaching. Their repositories are course material, starter templates and worked examples rather than production dependencies.
This is worth understanding if you are benchmarking your own profile against theirs: a repository with 30,000 stars that is a curriculum is a different artefact from a repository with 30,000 stars that ships in production at thousands of companies. Neither is lesser, but they are not comparable.
What this means for your own profile
The practical lesson from looking at a lot of high-follower profiles is that none of them got there by optimising their profile. They got there by building one or two things that other people needed, and the profile is a side effect.
The controllable parts are smaller and duller: pin the repositories you actually want to be judged on, write an introduction that says what you specifically do, and make sure your commits are attributed to an email your account recognises.
You can see how any of these profiles break down - languages, top repositories, contribution patterns - on their showcase pages, or generate the same view for your own account.