Takeaway: Hit a milestone! My portfolio 1chooo.com recently reached 300+ stars on GitHub!
1chooo.com taught me a powerful lesson: building great software is a lot like compound interest. At first, you put in tons of effort, and no one really notices. But if you consistently contribute valuable work to the community, the impact eventually compounds—and so does the admiration you earn. So, I think it's a great time to share how I've experienced this "software compound interest" through my open-source journey.
Star History
Here is the star history chart of 1chooo.com, a project I started developing on January 6, 2024. After more than a year of development, the project had fewer than 50 stars. Honestly, for a personal project without any promotion, that's still pretty good—but not quite satisfying, especially considering the amount of hard work put into it. Then, one small change turned everything around: I started promoting it. That changed the game completely.
Game Changer
Through open-source, I've made a bunch of friends on GitHub. One day, while chatting with my friend @m4xshen, he shared how his success in the open-source community came from actively engaging with others. He strongly encouraged me to start posting and promoting my work.
So, I recorded a one-minute demo using Screen Studio and posted it on Reddit:
Then—boom! That's when I truly started to feel the compound interest of developing software. I gained over 100 stars in less than a week. All the effort I had quietly invested over the past year suddenly began to pay off. It was incredible to see my work finally being appreciated!
On Reddit, I also received a lot of valuable feedback—people suggested ways to improve the design and offered encouragement. That feedback was not only helpful, but also motivating. The positive momentum, both from GitHub stars and community comments, really meant a lot.
What's more, after posting on Reddit, my project was reposted on Twitter (X), which led to the second exponential boost in stars—another wave of that software compound interest kicking in.
Iteration
So far, we've talked about the value I've gained from GitHub—but just as important is what I've learned from evolving the tech stack behind the project.
When I started, I only knew HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. But as the project evolved, I learned React, adopted Next.js for routing and server-side rendering, and eventually used Turborepo to manage a scalable monorepo.
This portfolio became my sandbox where I built a Markdown blog system, pushed Lighthouse scores near 100, refined SEO, and learned to manage internal npm packages without version conflicts.
Each step taught me something new and pushed me from frontend basics toward system thinking—how to build software that scales, maintains, and lasts.
Quiet Moments
In 2024 alone, I made over 5,000 contributions on GitHub. Of course, not all of them were groundbreaking—some were just minor tweaks, refactors, or chores. And sure, some people joked that I should "touch some grass." I usually reply, "nuh, this is really my grass."
But honestly, even if many of those commits were invisible to the whole community and the outside world, they weren't meaningless. A few fixed critical bugs. Others unlocked new features or helped me better understand the tech stack I was working with. Some days were just about showing up and pushing forward.
Looking back, it's clear that those quiet, persistent contributions laid the foundation for everything that came later.
Shining
Quiet effort is important, but it's not always enough.
It's easy to finish a project and hope someone notices, but I realized we have to speak up. Sharing the story behind your work isn't showing off—it's an invitation for others to connect with your journey.
Sharing what you've built can open unexpected doors. It gives your project a chance to be discovered and gives people a chance to connect with your values and vision.
For me, that shift happened when I posted on Reddit. That one post didn't just showcase the project—it broke the silence I had been sitting in for a year. And in that moment, the work I'd quietly built finally started to shine.
Compound
This is exactly what I mean by Software Compound Interest: when you consistently invest time, passion, and care into a project, the value accumulates quietly. Each small improvement compounds over time, building up until your steady effort surpasses its maximum static friction. At that point, what felt like slow growth suddenly turns into exponential momentum, and the results accelerate beyond what you imagined.
So if you're building something, keep going. Even when no one's watching. Especially when no one's watching.
Ultimately, this is the power of software compound interest: consistent effort, even in the quiet moments, always compounds into unexpected and exponential rewards.
