An awesome list is a page on GitHub where people who care about a subject keep a curated list of the best tools, libraries and reading for it. The good ones are maintained by a community, pruned when links die, and sorted into sections so you can skim straight to what you need. They are the raven’s favourite kind of find, because someone else has already done the collecting.
I keep coming back to the same handful. These are the ones I would bookmark if I were starting over, grouped by the kind of work they help with. Star counts are from GitHub as of October 2026, rounded, and every list here has been updated within the last year and a half.
Start here
- Awesome (~520k stars). The list of awesome lists. If a subject has a curated list, it is probably linked from here, under headings like Platforms, Programming Languages, Security and Networking.
Sysadmin and homelab
- Awesome Sysadmin (~35k stars). Free and open-source software for running systems: backups, configuration management, monitoring, DNS, identity management and more. There is also an easier-to-browse HTML version.
- Awesome-Selfhosted (~330k stars). Free software network services and web applications you can host on your own servers instead of renting them from someone else. It is huge, so use the HTML version and its categories.
- Awesome Homelab (~2.6k stars). Open-source apps picked for homelab people, sorted by job: backup, DNS, dashboards, automation, AI and so on. Smaller than the self-hosted list, and a good second opinion.
- Awesome Docker (~37k stars). Projects built for Docker, from building images to networking, storage and security, plus a Where to Start section, including one for Windows.
- Awesome Computer Networking Resources (~730 stars). Resources to design, implement and operate networks: routing, switching, VPN, network automation and monitoring. Small, but practical.
Windows and PowerShell
- Awesome Windows (~3k stars). Tools and apps for Windows 10 and 11, marked as open source or paid, from command-line tools and backup to networking and developer utilities.
- Awesome PowerShell (~5.4k stars on its old GitHub home). PowerShell modules and resources: build tools, testing, logging, SQL Server, SharePoint and more. It moved from GitHub to Codeberg and the GitHub copy is archived, so follow this link to the live one.
Development
- Awesome .NET (~22k stars). A collection of .NET libraries, tools, frameworks and software, from APIs and authentication to logging and testing. This is where this post started; I first saved it through the rajeshponnala fork, and the maintained original is the one linked here.
- Awesome Shell (~38k stars). Command-line frameworks, toolkits, guides and gizmos, from shells and prompt customisation to system utilities and script development.
- Awesome Falsehood (~28k stars). The fun one: falsehoods programmers believe about names, dates and time, postal addresses, phone numbers and more. Read the dates section before you write your own date handling.
Security
- Awesome Security (~15k stars). Software, libraries, documents and books about security, grouped by network, endpoint, threat intelligence, web and more.
Cloud and AI
- Awesome Azure Architecture (~1.7k stars). Blogs, videos, tutorials, code, tools and scripts for designing and building solutions in Azure, split into official Microsoft and community sections.
- Awesome MCP Servers (~97k stars). Model Context Protocol servers, the pieces that let AI models work with local and remote tools and data, sorted by category, with sections on clients and tutorials.
- Awesome AI Agents (~31k stars). AI agents and assistants, open source and closed source, each with a short description and links. It is kept by the team behind E2B.
Finding more
When you need a list I haven’t named, start from the list of lists or browse the GitHub topic awesome. Before you lean on one, check when it was last updated. A list nobody prunes slowly fills up with dead links.