Every number on awesomemap comes straight from daily GitHub star snapshots, run through the same formulas for every project — no manual curation of order. Here's exactly what each one measures.
Star-history snapshots taken daily · growth windows: 7 / 30 / 90 days
The percent (and absolute) change in stars over a chosen window — 7 / 30 / 90 days. It's measured from the snapshot closest to that many days ago to the latest snapshot, so one missed snapshot day doesn't break the number. This is what every growth badge across the site — a domain card, a category row, a tag, a project — is showing.
Popular mode sizes each project by its raw star count — the established players. Rising mode sizes and ranks projects by a velocity score instead: star gain ÷ √(current stars + 2,000). The square-root term keeps a tiny project's noisy swing (say, 2 stars → 6) from outranking a large project's genuinely bigger gain — without it, a small denominator would let noise dominate. The Rising leaderboard ranks by this same score.
Shown as "Where the heat is" on each domain page: the aggregate growth of every tracked project in a category, computed as one summed star delta over one summed baseline — not an average of each project's percentage. Averaging would let a single small project that tripled outweigh fifty established ones and report a category as exploding when it barely moved. Only projects with enough history for the window count toward the figure; coverage (e.g. "12/15 tracked") is shown alongside it.
Four highlights on the homepage, drawn only from projects that gained at least 5 stars this week — below that, a gain is ordinary week-to-week noise, not a signal:
Every tracked project's star count is snapshotted once a day. A window needs a snapshot at least that old to report growth — until then, a project shows "Not tracked yet" rather than a fabricated 0%.
