Last Tuesday I got a notification from GitHub: PR #1110 merged into 1c7/chinese-independent-developer. Bot user app/claude auto-merged it in 1 hour 33 minutes. The list has 49,000 stars. The side project I have been shipping for the last six months was now an entry on a list I had been staring at for almost two years.
I want to write down what I actually did to get in, because the obvious story ("PR to a curated list, got merged") is the wrong story. The real story is seven weeks of prep for one line of diff.
What I assumed before I started
The naive plan was: find a curated list, ship a one-liner, ship a PR, win. I tried that on three different lists in 2025. Every time my PR sat open for weeks, then closed without comment or got rejected silently. I assumed the lists were gatekept by humans who never check the queue. I was wrong. Some of them are auto-merged by bots. Some of them have rigid contribution templates that fail in subtle ways. None of them care about one-line pitches.
What they actually care about: does your entry match the format of the entries around it. That was the lesson. Not product quality. Format.
