From JSON to Tables: How Eddie Jaoude Automates His Open Source Work
Eddie Jaoude is a senior full stack developer with 15 years of experience who has spent his entire career advocating for open source. Based in the UK, he's also a GitHub Star and active content creator. For Jaoude, open source is more than just writing code—it's a way to sharpen both technical and communication skills.
I strive to improve my technical and communication skills by maintaining and contributing to many Open Source projects on GitHub. I also get involved in public speaking, live streaming and content creation whilst documenting the journey of the tech community.
Fixing a Common README Problem
With the rise of GitHub README profiles, Jaoude noticed a recurring issue: many of these profiles used HTML tables to display content. He was maintaining an open source project that listed noteworthy custom GitHub profiles, and contributors kept struggling to add their own entries.
The problem was that the table's code was inconsistent between contributors, and changing something as simple as the number of columns meant reprogramming the entire table. Rather than wrestling with manual fixes, Jaoude restructured the whole approach.
As a result, I converted the html table to a json file and the GitHub Action converts the json file to a html table, with configurable options. For example as variable column numbers and table cell formatting.
The result is the HTML table generator: contributors now update a JSON file, and the GitHub Action handles the rest.
That's not the end of the project. Jaoude plans to expand it further:
I intend on taking a json file and create other useful readme elements, making it more configurable.
He's also considering sorting actions, voting systems, and additional automation for his profile.
Flexibility and Learning in Public
What attracts Jaoude most to GitHub Actions is its flexibility. The platform's capacity to turn almost any idea into working automation is what keeps him building: if you can imagine a workflow, you can likely automate it.
Like many developers new to Actions, Jaoude found that the community was key to overcoming early learning curves. He points to the GitHub Learning Lab as a starting point, and shares his own insights through a YouTube channel—including an upcoming video specifically on GitHub Actions.
Jaoude also develops live on Twitch. During one stream, he built a GitHub Action from scratch while members of the GitHub engineering team joined in and offered support:
Live streaming the development of the GitHub Action was fantastic as some members of the GitHub engineering team joined which promoted a real sense of community and support.
Getting Started Yourself
For developers inspired to try their hand at GitHub Actions, Jaoude recommends just diving in—it builds on the idea of learning by doing that's central to open source. Beginners can start with the Learning Lab course on Actions basics, and developers looking for inspiration can browse the GitHub Marketplace, which hosts hundreds of community-built Actions including Jaoude's own HTML Table Generator. There, you'll find tools for deployment, messaging, container builds, and virtually any other automation you can dream up.
