My First NPM Package got 3,000 Downloads in a Week - 09/01/2025

React GitHub Dots - My NPM Journey

A year ago, I was creating my first blog with Astro, and I needed something to organize the blogs into pages. So I started searching online to see if Astro had anything to solve this, and Astro didn’t have anything built-in.

Until I randomly found a blog talking about an npm package for Astro to manage blog pagination. The creator was Phil Nash. Months later, I went to a talk he gave in Berlin at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress.

The internet is beautiful, and the community is beautiful too. Someone who also needed a pagination component not only created it but shared it with the community.

Every day we use things made by people without thinking about it, but that day it caught my attention so much that I went to learn more about Phil Nash. I had never looked up who the author of an NPM package was before.

After this, I had the idea to create an NPM package too. I had no idea where to start - it seemed like something only hackers could do.

However, now even though I don’t have much experience, we have great AI tools plus the internet itself that explain the process almost like having a senior developer next to us.

And last weekend the idea came: I was creating a new portfolio and thought it would be cool to add the GitHub contributions graph, the one with the green dots.

So why not create it not just for me but for anyone who wants to use it?

Boom! Done Green Dots created, and in less than a week it already has +3,000 downloads on NPM.

The internet is beautiful! And again, thanks to Phil for the inspiration he gave me that day.