Introduction

Vaunt is a platform that helps developers showcase their contributions to open-source projects. With Vaunt, you can create embeddable SVG cards that show off your skills, achievements, and contributions. You can also use Vaunt's public API to get data about your contributions, and you can even automate the creation of Vaunt cards with GitHub Actions.

In this post, we will be highlighting some of the recent features we have launched!

Features

Embeddable SVG cards

Vaunt cards are beautiful, interactive SVGs that developers can embed in their websites or blogs. Our cards allow developers to show off their skills, achievements, and contributions in a visually appealing way.

This feature is live and developers are already finding value. Today we are showcasing Baruch, who is a software engineer that has been contributing to open-source projects for several years.

To highlight his experience and attract potential employers, he decided to spice up his GitHub profile. To accomplish this, Baruch installed Vaunt on his GitHub account. Vaunt automatically generates a dynamic SVG card showcasing his skills, contributions, and achievements across projects in an appealing visual format. The developer cards display his contribution count, his total pull requests merged, issues closed, earned achievements, and other key metrics.

With Vaunt's developer card, his profile is now highlighting his experience.

We believe that this simple addition gives Baruch more opportunities to collaborate and draw interest in the great work he is doing.

To learn more about this feature, check out our past blog covering Developer Cards.

Custom achievements

Vaunt lets you create custom achievements for your projects. We think of custom achievements as a living contributors guide that rewards contributors as they add contributions that align with your repository goals.

We strongly believe, adding custom achievements to a repository encourages new contributions. This is also a great way to recognize the contributions your community members push and celebrate their collaboration.

As a maintainer, achievements give you the ability to incentivize qualified contributions to your repository. Our CTO, Ethan Lewis, has added custom achievements to one of his personal repositories boa.

As the maintainer of Boa, Ethan identified three primary goals for his repository. His first goal is to increase visibility for Boa by getting more stars. The second is to drive new ideas or feature requests to the project to ensure it provides useful functionality to users. His last goal is to encourage interactive pull requests by asking for reviews.

To encourage contributors to make contributions to Boa that align with his 3 goals, Ethan developed an achievement called “Snake Charmer”. This achievement is awarded to any contributor that has starred the repository and either opened an issue with an enhancement label or reviewed a pull request!

You can view how this achievement was set up here.

To learn more about custom achievement check out our previous blog and head over to our documentation site here.

Public API

Vaunt's public API lets you get data about your contributions to open-source projects. This data can be used to create custom dashboards, reports, and visualizations. We leveraged Vaunt’s public API to build our developer cards feature.

You can see how the API is being used by taking a look at Akshita Gupta’s repository Moksh. Akshita maintains several open-source repositories on GitHub and she wanted to find a way to recognize the contributions of their developers to open source projects.

Our team worked with Akshita to build a contributors board that could be embedded within her project's readme. We were thrilled to see her response https://twitter.com/Akshita_archer/status/1680136470529703938?s=20

Vaunt's integrations automatically quantify each developer's pull requests, issues, commits, and other engagements to pull contribution metrics. Adding a few lines of code to hit the Vaunt API provides the insights she needs and gives her developer community a fun shoutout for their hard work.

You can view this integration live here.

You can learn more about our public API from our previous blog and by heading over to our documentation site here.

Private Repositories

OSS is a core focus for Vaunt. However, private repositories can also benefit by leveraging Vaunt. Vaunt provides secure authentication and authorization to private repository data that piggybacks off of Github’s permission system. This means that you can use Vaunt to engage with your developers on private projects. Vaunt's features provide developers with clear guidelines on how to contribute to repositories and we see a tremendous opportunity for onboarding new developers by leveraging our achievements system, even if the repository is private.

Automation

Vaunt can be automated with GitHub Actions. This means that you can create a workflow that automatically creates Vaunt cards for your contributions. This feature was born out of the support for private repositories. There are a few steps that users are required to take when accessing private repositories, such as secure JWT generation and usage. Our Github action reduces these steps and ensures users follow our best practices when sharing contribution insights.

You can learn more about our Automation here.

Community Boards

Vaunt Community Boards provide community statistics, repository insights, and a view into repository achievements. They can be used to track the growth and popularity of open-source projects, as well as to identify trends in the open-source community. They can also be used to showcase the contributions of individual developers and teams.

You can learn more about our community board here.

Conclusion

Vaunt is a powerful tool that can help you showcase your developer contributions. With Vaunt, you can create beautiful, interactive SVG cards that show off your skills, achievements, and contributions. You can also use Vaunt's public API to get data about your contributions, and you can even automate the creation of Vaunt cards with GitHub Actions. With the addition of Community Boards, you can share and promote your developer communities with ease!

Sign up for Vaunt today and start showcasing your developer contributions!

To stay in the loop on future developments follow us on Twitter or join our Discord! Don't hesitate to make feature requests.