As my tens, if not dozens of followers on Twitter can attest, I tweet in fits and starts. I do, however, keep a pretty close eye on trending GitHub reposities; occasionally I stumble across an open source project that solves a problem that's been on my mind or sparks a new idea. It's a place to look for inspiration—something I use Twitter for too. When I find a GitHub repo I'm interested in, I star it. Wouldn't it be nice if that showed up on my Twitter feed?

So my Saturday morning project became starbird. Using a scheduled AWS lambda function, starbird checks for newly starred repos on my GitHub account every minute and tweets any new ones for me. My AWS free year is up, but this lambda function will probably cost me about 10 cents to run per month. The project uses the serverless framework which automates away most of the busy work of a lambda function, letting me focus on what lambda advertises: just the code. I especially appreciated how it dealt with node dependencies.

The setup feels a bit like IFTTT, except it could do anything.