GitHub README layouts

In most common scenarios, README files can have one of the following layouts.

Basic

• Introduction
• Where to download?
• License
• Versioning scheme
• Build instructions
• Contributing guidelines
• Credits

The basic layout might seems too much in the beginning, but I think this is quite essential and valuable information that each open source project could have.

Being able to scan through each of these sections saves a lot of time.

Extended

• Basic +
• What problem does the project address?
• Who cares?
• How does it work?

Including these additional sections in the README almost eliminates the need to write an introductory blog post about the project.

Mature

• Extended +
• Open source maturity level¹
• Documentation
• Questions
• Who uses it?
• Additional resources

As the project becomes bigger and successful, these additional sections tend to minimize potential duplicate questions on Stack Overflow and questions as issues on GitHub.

---

¹ The description for the maturity levels of open source code can be found here.