> A feature that'd let me browse by "topic" (e.g systems programming) regardless of language would be welcome as well.
What you're talking about already exists. In fact, they're called topics, e.g.: https://github.com/topics/systems-engineering
What you're talking about already exists. In fact, they're called topics, e.g.: https://github.com/topics/systems-engineering
No one or few people self-reference their repo with something as broad as "systems engineering" or "systems programming".
The closest thing that exist on Github is the explore tab which lets you browse random repos by categories (e.g open government). Such feature would require Github to do the appropriate groundwork to become great at technology-discovery, namely: interest maps, automatically infer a repo's category based on its content, description and the profiles that star or fork it, for starters. They can even make their search engine relevant and pleasant to use if they feel like treating us.
And I'd want that to be integrated in my feed. Right now, I follow around 150 active users and it is still pretty sparse: it's not uncommon for me to see "X started Y 2 days ago". It would be good to add more (good) signal.
I want to see more of what better programmers are starring.
> A feature that'd let me browse by "topic" (e.g systems programming) regardless of language would be welcome as well.
Topics are exactly what you initially described. Perhaps you didn't do a very good job describing what you'd like.
Also, they're called topics. Not tags. It's in the documentation.
> Such feature would require Github to do the appropriate groundwork to become great at technology-discovery, namely
They did a bunch of work to automatically add topics for many repositories to solve for this: https://githubengineering.com/topics/
I tell you it only does so nominally. I didn't fully develop its specs but you could have inferred that they weren't matching the existing one's. The topic feature is half-baked, poorly thought-out and integrated.