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Show HN: Discover your ranking on GitHub

137 points by picsoung 12y ago

picsoung 12y ago
I am pretty surprised by my ranking in San Francisco :) 86 in Lua devs? not so many Lua devs around ... Also, it seems that some of my repo are not taking into account, like https://github.com/picsoung/uberSlackBot https://github.com/picsoung/uberSlackBot which has 13 stars.
- catwell 12y ago
  I am ranked N.1 for Lua in Paris and N.66 worlwide, but yes, there are not that many Lua devs on GitHub (the Open Source community is small).
  - picsoung 12y ago
    We should take it as a chance to be #1 somewhere ;)
- vdaubry 12y ago
  The stars information comes from GitHub Archive : https://www.githubarchive.org/ https://www.githubarchive.org/ There are some limitations, for example it doesn't include events before 2011 The concept of "star" has also changed several times (they are still called watchers in the API)
- mrottenkolber 12y ago
  I'm #1 in my town. :> It only sees 2 CL repositories though (of 10 or so):(.
sfk 12y ago
A further step towards the gamification of Open Source development. On the other hand, maybe that's Github's future business model: Rank Open Source slaves and sell that information to recruiters.
- jinnovation 12y ago
  It sounds like you're opposed to the gamification; care to explain why? I'm curious.
  - functional_test 12y ago
    Isn't it right there in his comment? Seems that he doesn't like the idea of having to work for free to "rank higher" if recruiters start to use these sorts of scores. Since no other profession has to work for free like this(see: the carpenter analogy), it seems a reasonable position.
    - thebouv 12y ago
      It's already started, right? "Github is your resume" is often said; which sucks for those of us who work on enterprise software and private repos that can't be open sourced. All kudos to those that can spare the time for, make their livelihood on, or have their company allow them to release, open source software. I want to be like you, but unfortunately cannot.
    - tokenrove 12y ago
      > Since no other profession has to work for free like this This is untrue, though. The concept of building a portfolio exists across all creative domains, and almost everyone builds that portfolio initially by doing the work for its own sake.
  - Goronmon 12y ago
    The biggest problem is that gamification tends to provide incentives to improve your efficiency in affecting the "game" portion, to the detriment of the actual thing being scored. As the game becomes more popular, the game becomes what is important.
    - luisobo 12y ago
      that's a flaw in the design of a particular the game and not a flaw of gamification itself. What if you could only be rewarded by doing things properly? By trying to affect the outcome of the game you will be improving how you do things normally.
muddy 12y ago
Awesome !!
cblavier 12y ago
Great idea, and quite funny to use :)
vdaubry 12y ago
Hi, I'm vincent author of GitHub Awards, if you have any questions feel free to ask
- kylec 12y ago
  It didn't detect my location correctly. I'm in the Boston area, not the UK: http://github-awards.com/users/search?login=kylecronin http://github-awards.com/users/search?login=kylecronin https://github.com/kylecronin https://github.com/kylecronin
  - filiwickers 12y ago
    Also, it looks like the cities w/ the same name in different countries are treated as one city. I am in Santa Fe, NM but ranked with people in Santa Fe, Argentina.
  - azdle 12y ago
    Same for me: http://github-awards.com/users/search?login=Azdle http://github-awards.com/users/search?login=Azdle Tells me I'm in Houston, actually in Minneapolis.
  - rhodysurf 12y ago
    Same I'm in Rhode Island not Irvine http://github-awards.com/users/search?login=mpiannucci http://github-awards.com/users/search?login=mpiannucci
  - amadvance 12y ago
    Same here. I'm from Italy, but reported from Madagascar :) https://github.com/amadvance https://github.com/amadvance http://github-awards.com/users/search?login=amadvance http://github-awards.com/users/search?login=amadvance
- duckworth 12y ago
  What are you using to parse and resolve location? There doesn't seem to be a suggested format for a github profile and myself, like many other people in the US just put in a State abbreviation or City name which has DC in Van, Turkey.
codebeaker 12y ago
Surprised to see that I'm only detected as having 34 "Ruby" stars when one of my Ruby projects has ~6,700 stars, all told across all my projects I ought to have closer to 10k ★. Fun project, but buggy data makes for a bit of a crappy user experience. Doesn't GH classify languages pretty well using it's Linguist project? The project with ~6,700 stars is correctly classified as [ Ruby 97.5% | HTML 2.5% ] (the 2.5% seems to be from documentation and templates, which in itself is already weird) I understand that many people find gamification fun, but I know a lot of people who don't like ranked leaderboards, based on stupid things like "how many people bookmarked your project", it leads to unnecessary egotistical competition, and driving more barriers between us than we need. (Example, what benefit would we get from comparing stars on vim, and neovim?… so we could argue to one group of people that their work is less important than another group?)
- arnauddri 12y ago
  same for me - plus it counts only half of my repos...
- vdaubry 12y ago
  What is your GitHub username ? GitHub Archive data are not perfect, and there are also room for improvements in the import process.
  - NathanKP 12y ago
    The stars are also inaccurate for me. Username: nathanpeck You are reporting 115 stars for JS, when I actually have 700+ Another thing to factor in to make this more accurate is to detect if repos are in a package system like bower or npm. If so then factor in the downloads for those packages. For example one of my repos only has 100 stars, but gets nearly 10,000 downloads a month on NPM. Another has 600+ stars but only gets around 100-200 downloads a month.
  - bronson 12y ago
    'tis but a google away: https://github.com/leehambley https://github.com/leehambley The 6700 star repo he's talking about is capistrano/capistrano. I asssume stars only apply for personal projects? Spin it off, lose your ranking. :)
fcambus 12y ago
Wondering how you deal with city names in languages other that English? Is that taken into account? For example, it seems that for Kraków (Poland) you have both Kraków and Cracow. PS : Great project!
luu 12y ago
This is really neat and I love playing with stuff like this. But, fundamentally, it shows that stars aren't a good measure of anything besides stars, at least outside of the top scorers for commonly used languages. For those, it's not a bad proxy for fame. If you like at the top javascript or ruby developers, yep, those are all pretty famous javascript and ruby developers. But if you look at the #6 matlab developer, well, turns out that's me. I've probably used matlab for less than 40 hours total, lifetime. And most of that was in grad school, a decade ago. Most of my stars come from a tutorial. Not a tutorial I created -- a tutorial I worked through, that thousands of people have probably done. Ok, so, not many people put matlab code on github, so that data is messy. What about popular languages? Turns out I'm also the 240th most starred scala developer worldwide. I once used scala for two months and created some projects to help me learn that aren't even close to being polished enough to be useful to anyone. Like most code written by someone who's learning a language, it's not any good. But that somehow puts me at 240? Even in a pretty popular language, by the time you get into the hundreds worldwide (or the top few in most cities), it's people who just threw up some toy projects. I wonder if this explains why I've been getting recruiters contacting me "because they saw my scala code on github". I doubt anyone who's actually seen my scala code on github would contact me for a scala position, but someone who uses a tool that counts stars might think that I actually know scala and contact me for a scala position. This particular tool is too new to be the source of that, but the page the source data comes from (github archive) shows how easy it is to make BigQuery queries to return results like this. For Julia, I'm also presently ranked above all of the co-creators of Julia, despite having spent a total of perhaps 20 hours ever using the language (I'm 72, compared to the co-creators, who are 113, 143, and unranked). BTW, in languages I've actually worked in professionally, I'm 98,582/244,375 in a language I used for years before it became trendy, 1,100/1,835 in a language I've used a lot recently, and 75,998/161,465 in a language I've used some recently. In the language I'm most proficient in, the language I'm mostly likely to reach for if I just want to get things done, I'm 14,800/25,094. P.S. If the developer is reading this and wants bugreports, your service returns a "503 Service Unavailable" if you click the "top foo github developers in your city" for developers that don't have an associated city.
- jrochkind1 12y ago
  That might just say there is very little matlab code on github. Or matlab users don't use github stars much? Perhaps a better label than 'top developer' would be 'developer of most popular repos' or something.
codebeaker 12y ago
I'd like to call out for the author of this that you are in breach of the Github name and branding usage guidelines: > ## Naming projects and products > Please avoid naming your projects anything that implies GitHub’s endorsement. This also applies to domain names. (Reference: https://github.com/logos https://github.com/logos) Edit: Why the downvotes? It's valid, and if someone had used my company name in their unauthorized, misleading and buggy "awards" platform, we'd be asking them to refrain from attaching themselves to our name and brand.
- jcoder 12y ago
  Absolutely right, my upvote FWIW.
- jlarocco 12y ago
  I wish GitHub would crack down harder on sites that do this. This site, and a lot of the other sites that use GitHub APIs and data are clearly trying to blur the boundary between whether they're part of GitHub or not, and it's incredibly annoying. I don't pay for my GitHub account so that I can have some goofy ranking, or spend 10 minutes wondering, "Is this site really affiliated with GitHub?" If it keeps up, I'll probably migrate to BitBucket at some point.
  - booruguru 12y ago
    > I don't pay for my GitHub account so that I can have some goofy ranking, or spend 10 minutes wondering, "Is this site really affiliated with GitHub?" If it keeps up, I'll probably migrate to BitBucket at some point. What on earth are you talking about? If you don't care care about your ranking, nobody is forcing you to care. (Yet, you might switch to a rival platform because...?)
    - jlarocco 12y ago
      It's pretty obvious really. The sites are a distraction I don't want, and they're a distraction I wouldn't have with BitBucket. Yes, in this case it's just a stupid ranking, but in the past there have been more serious fakes, where GitHub has had to step in and tell people a site isn't related to them.
m0th87 12y ago
This brings up something I've been grappling with. How do you get more eyeballs on your open source work? I have a few projects, as does my company, but getting more interest/stars seems like it requires a large investment - substantially larger than any benefit we'd likely derive. "Back in the day" I remember it was as easy as sharing with a few friends or posting on HN, and it would quickly get some traction. Now it feels as if you need marketing clout.
- jrochkind1 12y ago
  Well, if you don't really care if anyone else uses your open source, then it doesn't really matter, right? The reasons you might care are -- to get more contributors, to make the software more sustainable; fame for your yourself or your company (how valuable is this?); etc. Being clear on what benefit (if any) you will get from the project being more popular will make it easier to guess whether the 'investment' will be worth the 'benefit'. But how do you do it? I think you've got to not just 'advertise' in general interest places like HN. You've got to find the community of people who will find your code most useful (perhaps people in the same business domain as you are working), and advertise to them, sometimes direct one on one. Conferences and meet-ups are good for this. I think you've also got to have really good docs, and really good release management practices (semver, no backwards compat bugs, no encouraging using off 'master' instead of a release, good release notes, etc). And if still nobody is using it, then I guess they don't actually find your software useful!
- danabramov 12y ago
  Personally I have not found this difficult. Get engaged with the community. Follow folks building stuff in your ecosystem on Twitter. Follow them on Github. Then mention them when you release something cool, make good screenshots and a nice intro. It takes one tweet about your project to go heavily retweeted before all sorts of people interested in your future work follow you, and so it goes on and on. Of course this will only happen if your project is explained well, integrates into your ecosystem's package management, etc. Make sure it looks as tidy and maintained as other popular open source projects you know and love. Finally, don't forget to star your own repos. This puts them into GH newsletter the next day (“starred by people you follow” section, assuming you already got someone following you), and also will put these repos on your profile page above your forks of other people's projects.
jdjb 12y ago
Is the score formula correct? sum(stars) + (1.0 - 1.0/count(repositories)) So if I have 3000 stars and 10 repositories, you give me a score of 3000.9? Shouldn't it be multiplied?
- robertk 12y ago
  It's for tiebreakers.
jrochkind1 12y ago
It told me it coudln't identify my city from my github account. Indeed, i did not have "location" field filled out in my github profile. I went and filled it out. But it still says it cant' identify my city. Caching? Which hopefully will be refreshed at some point? Or do I need to fill out my location in a way other than I have?
- mholt 12y ago
  Same problem here. I filled out my city just as other developers who show up for my city have done but it still says "We couldn't find your city from your location on github :("
  - jmhobbs 12y ago
    Looking at the source repo, it is not using real-time API results. Probably have to wait for the devs to sync it again. https://github.com/vdaubry/github-awards https://github.com/vdaubry/github-awards
    - jrochkind1 12y ago
      Darnit, I'd be #4 in my city if only it recognized me!
swah 12y ago
http://github-awards.com/users?language=c&type=world http://github-awards.com/users?language=c&type=world
lettergram 12y ago
Kind of question the validity of the rating. I'm supposedly ranked 2,390/161,465 world wide for C++ development. Yet, I have only been posting any code to github for the past year, and I know quite a few better C++ developers than me ranked way below me.
danso 12y ago
It's surprising to me that so many in this thread are asking if these rankings are legit. Of course they aren't -- they operate on a simplification that trade accuracy for convenience. It's one developer's side project...many professional companies and analysts have failed to encapsulate the worth of a human being as a number, why should this developer be any better? That said, I imagine a lot of headhunter companies use the same kind of heuristic, which is probably why I get so many unsolicited interview requests despite my lackluster activity (I'm in the top 200 developers of Ruby in New York, and #3200 in CSS...of the entire world)
- knowtheory 12y ago
  Yep, and the location identification is pretty broken too. I live in Columbia Missouri (MO) and the rankings for "Columbia" include folks from Columbia Maryland (MD) and Columbia South Carolina (SC). So even if people want to use dashboard summary data like this, they should do some basic validation to figure out what the data means and how it was analyzed (and what flaws it might entail).
matthuggins 12y ago
The city search thing doesn't work right as far as I can tell. I live in Louisville, CO, but it was showing users from Louisville, KY.
csl 12y ago
The cool thing is, of course, to find like-minded people locally! It would be nice to be able to see results by specifying a geographic radius.
- r3bl 12y ago
  I agree with this. This might be an awesome way to connect with some local developers. Unfortunately, the location feature is practically useless (for now) as proven multiple times here in the comments section. Another proof: My city is actually called Brčko, but most of the people around here just use generic English keyboard and they type in Brcko instead. Of course, they're considered as two different cities.
ehamberg 12y ago
There's a bug with the city/country detection: People with only a country as their location, e.g. “Norway” are detected as being in “Norway, United States”. :-)
lucisferre 12y ago
I run most of my projects under an organization so this doesn't really work. Also stars aren't really a great measure of anything after a point. Perfect example are the json-jwt and ruby-jwt gems. The latter gets more stars because it is arguably easier for people to find even though the former is a far more complete and robust implementation of the JWT spec.
- josegonzalez 12y ago
  Same here. I contribute a large part of my OS time at the moment to CakePHP projects - under an org - and Dokku - under another person's username. Everytime I see a site that ranks developers based on github profiles, I cringe a bit. On that note, I'm apparently the 3rd top PHP developer in NYC. That strikes me as a bit odd, as Phil Sturgeon is also in the area. I guess they don't count "Bristol & Brooklyn" as NYC :)
- welder 12y ago
  We're trying to bridge the gap between private repos and public profiles. Nobody sees the work you put into your org-repos, but that work can still be shown on our leaderboard at https://wakatime.com/leaders https://wakatime.com/leaders
  - lucisferre 12y ago
    They aren't private repos, they are just open source projects I keep under my organization instead of my own account.
    - welder 12y ago
      Oh got it. The good thing is WakaTime tracks the time you spent coding independently of the repo. We just use your repo when cross-referencing time spent per commit, but your public profile is populated even if you never use version control. P.S. The current profile is basic but here's what it will look like soon: http://www.reddit.com/r/WakaTime/comments/2uqgww/mockup_new_profile_page/ http://www.reddit.com/r/WakaTime/comments/2uqgww/mockup_new_...
cheshire137 12y ago
Why does it think Kentucky is in Australia? My profile: https://github.com/moneypenny https://github.com/moneypenny
- nightbrawler 12y ago
  It also thinks 'New Mexico' is in Mexico.
- privong 12y ago
  Confused geo-assignment, I guess. There is a Kentucky in Australia: http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/-30.7589/151.4659 http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/-30.7589/151.4659
vkjv 12y ago
This appears to be improperly including the stars from repositories that you forked.
fiatjaf 12y ago
Thank you! I was almost doing this myself, but you did it first, now I'm free! How much did it take? Too much data? How much? How did you get it?
- vdaubry 12y ago
  Glad you like it ! The database is about 20GB. All details about the import are on the readme : https://github.com/vdaubry/github-awards https://github.com/vdaubry/github-awards
LukeB_UK 12y ago
I don't think it takes into account the country, just the city. I live in Halifax, UK and it compared me with people in Halifax, Canada. Edit: Also, I have more than 1 star on my projects, yet it just reports 1?
- flurdy 12y ago
  At least it finds a Halifax. My location is set as Hampshire which it has never heard of, and for some reason it compared me to other Scala people in Guyana, the country. :) Though meetup.com is not much better. Their geoip correctly identifies my town as Alton, Hampshire, then shows all the meetups near the village Alton in Staffordshire... Facebook is not much better. My town is not an accepted location but any of the surrounding villages are... Geoip and location is hard.
  - juliengrimal 12y ago
    Maybe you should move out of your city ? ;)
tessierashpool 12y ago
according to this site, I'm the #1 developer in Mexico for a ton of languages. in reality, I'm not in Mexico. similar comments abound: "I live in Halifax, UK and it compared me with people in Halifax, Canada." "I'm only detected as having 34 Ruby stars when one of my Ruby projects has ~6,700 stars." another comment: "[the site is] in breach of the Github name and branding usage guidelines." this thing is a mess, and I'm about to get a ton of emails from recruiters who want to me to work in Mexico now. on the bright side, at least I'll get to practice my Spanish.
- count 12y ago
  It's only pulling the first part - my profile says 'Van down by the river' and it put me in 'Van, Turkey'. Hilarious. Good to know I'm #1 Python guy of all the hobos down by the river!
  - tessierashpool 12y ago
    congratulations! achievement unlocked.
kristopolous 12y ago
What the? I'm one of the top css people? time to change my resume!

137 points by picsoung 12y ago

I am pretty surprised by my ranking in San Francisco :) 86 in Lua devs? not so many Lua devs around ... Also, it seems that some of my repo are not taking into account, like https://github.com/picsoung/uberSlackBot https://github.com/picsoung/uberSlackBot which has 13 stars.

catwell 12y ago
I am ranked N.1 for Lua in Paris and N.66 worlwide, but yes, there are not that many Lua devs on GitHub (the Open Source community is small).
- picsoung 12y ago
  We should take it as a chance to be #1 somewhere ;)
vdaubry 12y ago
The stars information comes from GitHub Archive : https://www.githubarchive.org/ https://www.githubarchive.org/ There are some limitations, for example it doesn't include events before 2011 The concept of "star" has also changed several times (they are still called watchers in the API)
mrottenkolber 12y ago
I'm #1 in my town. :> It only sees 2 CL repositories though (of 10 or so):(.

sfk 12y ago

A further step towards the gamification of Open Source development. On the other hand, maybe that's Github's future business model: Rank Open Source slaves and sell that information to recruiters.

jinnovation 12y ago
It sounds like you're opposed to the gamification; care to explain why? I'm curious.
- functional_test 12y ago
  Isn't it right there in his comment? Seems that he doesn't like the idea of having to work for free to "rank higher" if recruiters start to use these sorts of scores. Since no other profession has to work for free like this(see: the carpenter analogy), it seems a reasonable position.
  - thebouv 12y ago
    It's already started, right? "Github is your resume" is often said; which sucks for those of us who work on enterprise software and private repos that can't be open sourced. All kudos to those that can spare the time for, make their livelihood on, or have their company allow them to release, open source software. I want to be like you, but unfortunately cannot.
  - tokenrove 12y ago
    > Since no other profession has to work for free like this This is untrue, though. The concept of building a portfolio exists across all creative domains, and almost everyone builds that portfolio initially by doing the work for its own sake.
- Goronmon 12y ago
  The biggest problem is that gamification tends to provide incentives to improve your efficiency in affecting the "game" portion, to the detriment of the actual thing being scored. As the game becomes more popular, the game becomes what is important.
  - luisobo 12y ago
    that's a flaw in the design of a particular the game and not a flaw of gamification itself. What if you could only be rewarded by doing things properly? By trying to affect the outcome of the game you will be improving how you do things normally.

muddy 12y ago

Awesome !!

cblavier 12y ago

Great idea, and quite funny to use :)

vdaubry 12y ago

Hi, I'm vincent author of GitHub Awards, if you have any questions feel free to ask

kylec 12y ago
It didn't detect my location correctly. I'm in the Boston area, not the UK: http://github-awards.com/users/search?login=kylecronin http://github-awards.com/users/search?login=kylecronin https://github.com/kylecronin https://github.com/kylecronin
- filiwickers 12y ago
  Also, it looks like the cities w/ the same name in different countries are treated as one city. I am in Santa Fe, NM but ranked with people in Santa Fe, Argentina.
- azdle 12y ago
  Same for me: http://github-awards.com/users/search?login=Azdle http://github-awards.com/users/search?login=Azdle Tells me I'm in Houston, actually in Minneapolis.
- rhodysurf 12y ago
  Same I'm in Rhode Island not Irvine http://github-awards.com/users/search?login=mpiannucci http://github-awards.com/users/search?login=mpiannucci
- amadvance 12y ago
  Same here. I'm from Italy, but reported from Madagascar :) https://github.com/amadvance https://github.com/amadvance http://github-awards.com/users/search?login=amadvance http://github-awards.com/users/search?login=amadvance
duckworth 12y ago
What are you using to parse and resolve location? There doesn't seem to be a suggested format for a github profile and myself, like many other people in the US just put in a State abbreviation or City name which has DC in Van, Turkey.

codebeaker 12y ago

Surprised to see that I'm only detected as having 34 "Ruby" stars when one of my Ruby projects has ~6,700 stars, all told across all my projects I ought to have closer to 10k ★. Fun project, but buggy data makes for a bit of a crappy user experience. Doesn't GH classify languages pretty well using it's Linguist project? The project with ~6,700 stars is correctly classified as [ Ruby 97.5% | HTML 2.5% ] (the 2.5% seems to be from documentation and templates, which in itself is already weird) I understand that many people find gamification fun, but I know a lot of people who don't like ranked leaderboards, based on stupid things like "how many people bookmarked your project", it leads to unnecessary egotistical competition, and driving more barriers between us than we need. (Example, what benefit would we get from comparing stars on vim, and neovim?… so we could argue to one group of people that their work is less important than another group?)

arnauddri 12y ago
same for me - plus it counts only half of my repos...
vdaubry 12y ago
What is your GitHub username ? GitHub Archive data are not perfect, and there are also room for improvements in the import process.
- NathanKP 12y ago
  The stars are also inaccurate for me. Username: nathanpeck You are reporting 115 stars for JS, when I actually have 700+ Another thing to factor in to make this more accurate is to detect if repos are in a package system like bower or npm. If so then factor in the downloads for those packages. For example one of my repos only has 100 stars, but gets nearly 10,000 downloads a month on NPM. Another has 600+ stars but only gets around 100-200 downloads a month.
- bronson 12y ago
  'tis but a google away: https://github.com/leehambley https://github.com/leehambley The 6700 star repo he's talking about is capistrano/capistrano. I asssume stars only apply for personal projects? Spin it off, lose your ranking. :)

fcambus 12y ago

Wondering how you deal with city names in languages other that English? Is that taken into account? For example, it seems that for Kraków (Poland) you have both Kraków and Cracow. PS : Great project!

luu 12y ago

This is really neat and I love playing with stuff like this. But, fundamentally, it shows that stars aren't a good measure of anything besides stars, at least outside of the top scorers for commonly used languages. For those, it's not a bad proxy for fame. If you like at the top javascript or ruby developers, yep, those are all pretty famous javascript and ruby developers. But if you look at the #6 matlab developer, well, turns out that's me. I've probably used matlab for less than 40 hours total, lifetime. And most of that was in grad school, a decade ago. Most of my stars come from a tutorial. Not a tutorial I created -- a tutorial I worked through, that thousands of people have probably done. Ok, so, not many people put matlab code on github, so that data is messy. What about popular languages? Turns out I'm also the 240th most starred scala developer worldwide. I once used scala for two months and created some projects to help me learn that aren't even close to being polished enough to be useful to anyone. Like most code written by someone who's learning a language, it's not any good. But that somehow puts me at 240? Even in a pretty popular language, by the time you get into the hundreds worldwide (or the top few in most cities), it's people who just threw up some toy projects. I wonder if this explains why I've been getting recruiters contacting me "because they saw my scala code on github". I doubt anyone who's actually seen my scala code on github would contact me for a scala position, but someone who uses a tool that counts stars might think that I actually know scala and contact me for a scala position. This particular tool is too new to be the source of that, but the page the source data comes from (github archive) shows how easy it is to make BigQuery queries to return results like this. For Julia, I'm also presently ranked above all of the co-creators of Julia, despite having spent a total of perhaps 20 hours ever using the language (I'm 72, compared to the co-creators, who are 113, 143, and unranked). BTW, in languages I've actually worked in professionally, I'm 98,582/244,375 in a language I used for years before it became trendy, 1,100/1,835 in a language I've used a lot recently, and 75,998/161,465 in a language I've used some recently. In the language I'm most proficient in, the language I'm mostly likely to reach for if I just want to get things done, I'm 14,800/25,094. P.S. If the developer is reading this and wants bugreports, your service returns a "503 Service Unavailable" if you click the "top foo github developers in your city" for developers that don't have an associated city.

jrochkind1 12y ago
That might just say there is very little matlab code on github. Or matlab users don't use github stars much? Perhaps a better label than 'top developer' would be 'developer of most popular repos' or something.

codebeaker 12y ago

I'd like to call out for the author of this that you are in breach of the Github name and branding usage guidelines: > ## Naming projects and products > Please avoid naming your projects anything that implies GitHub’s endorsement. This also applies to domain names. (Reference: https://github.com/logos https://github.com/logos) Edit: Why the downvotes? It's valid, and if someone had used my company name in their unauthorized, misleading and buggy "awards" platform, we'd be asking them to refrain from attaching themselves to our name and brand.

jcoder 12y ago
Absolutely right, my upvote FWIW.
jlarocco 12y ago
I wish GitHub would crack down harder on sites that do this. This site, and a lot of the other sites that use GitHub APIs and data are clearly trying to blur the boundary between whether they're part of GitHub or not, and it's incredibly annoying. I don't pay for my GitHub account so that I can have some goofy ranking, or spend 10 minutes wondering, "Is this site really affiliated with GitHub?" If it keeps up, I'll probably migrate to BitBucket at some point.
- booruguru 12y ago
  > I don't pay for my GitHub account so that I can have some goofy ranking, or spend 10 minutes wondering, "Is this site really affiliated with GitHub?" If it keeps up, I'll probably migrate to BitBucket at some point. What on earth are you talking about? If you don't care care about your ranking, nobody is forcing you to care. (Yet, you might switch to a rival platform because...?)
  - jlarocco 12y ago
    It's pretty obvious really. The sites are a distraction I don't want, and they're a distraction I wouldn't have with BitBucket. Yes, in this case it's just a stupid ranking, but in the past there have been more serious fakes, where GitHub has had to step in and tell people a site isn't related to them.

m0th87 12y ago

This brings up something I've been grappling with. How do you get more eyeballs on your open source work? I have a few projects, as does my company, but getting more interest/stars seems like it requires a large investment - substantially larger than any benefit we'd likely derive. "Back in the day" I remember it was as easy as sharing with a few friends or posting on HN, and it would quickly get some traction. Now it feels as if you need marketing clout.

jrochkind1 12y ago
Well, if you don't really care if anyone else uses your open source, then it doesn't really matter, right? The reasons you might care are -- to get more contributors, to make the software more sustainable; fame for your yourself or your company (how valuable is this?); etc. Being clear on what benefit (if any) you will get from the project being more popular will make it easier to guess whether the 'investment' will be worth the 'benefit'. But how do you do it? I think you've got to not just 'advertise' in general interest places like HN. You've got to find the community of people who will find your code most useful (perhaps people in the same business domain as you are working), and advertise to them, sometimes direct one on one. Conferences and meet-ups are good for this. I think you've also got to have really good docs, and really good release management practices (semver, no backwards compat bugs, no encouraging using off 'master' instead of a release, good release notes, etc). And if still nobody is using it, then I guess they don't actually find your software useful!
danabramov 12y ago
Personally I have not found this difficult. Get engaged with the community. Follow folks building stuff in your ecosystem on Twitter. Follow them on Github. Then mention them when you release something cool, make good screenshots and a nice intro. It takes one tweet about your project to go heavily retweeted before all sorts of people interested in your future work follow you, and so it goes on and on. Of course this will only happen if your project is explained well, integrates into your ecosystem's package management, etc. Make sure it looks as tidy and maintained as other popular open source projects you know and love. Finally, don't forget to star your own repos. This puts them into GH newsletter the next day (“starred by people you follow” section, assuming you already got someone following you), and also will put these repos on your profile page above your forks of other people's projects.

jdjb 12y ago

Is the score formula correct? sum(stars) + (1.0 - 1.0/count(repositories)) So if I have 3000 stars and 10 repositories, you give me a score of 3000.9? Shouldn't it be multiplied?

robertk 12y ago
It's for tiebreakers.

jrochkind1 12y ago

It told me it coudln't identify my city from my github account. Indeed, i did not have "location" field filled out in my github profile. I went and filled it out. But it still says it cant' identify my city. Caching? Which hopefully will be refreshed at some point? Or do I need to fill out my location in a way other than I have?

mholt 12y ago
Same problem here. I filled out my city just as other developers who show up for my city have done but it still says "We couldn't find your city from your location on github :("
- jmhobbs 12y ago
  Looking at the source repo, it is not using real-time API results. Probably have to wait for the devs to sync it again. https://github.com/vdaubry/github-awards https://github.com/vdaubry/github-awards
  - jrochkind1 12y ago
    Darnit, I'd be #4 in my city if only it recognized me!

swah 12y ago

http://github-awards.com/users?language=c&type=world http://github-awards.com/users?language=c&type=world

lettergram 12y ago

Kind of question the validity of the rating. I'm supposedly ranked 2,390/161,465 world wide for C++ development. Yet, I have only been posting any code to github for the past year, and I know quite a few better C++ developers than me ranked way below me.

danso 12y ago

It's surprising to me that so many in this thread are asking if these rankings are legit. Of course they aren't -- they operate on a simplification that trade accuracy for convenience. It's one developer's side project...many professional companies and analysts have failed to encapsulate the worth of a human being as a number, why should this developer be any better? That said, I imagine a lot of headhunter companies use the same kind of heuristic, which is probably why I get so many unsolicited interview requests despite my lackluster activity (I'm in the top 200 developers of Ruby in New York, and #3200 in CSS...of the entire world)

knowtheory 12y ago
Yep, and the location identification is pretty broken too. I live in Columbia Missouri (MO) and the rankings for "Columbia" include folks from Columbia Maryland (MD) and Columbia South Carolina (SC). So even if people want to use dashboard summary data like this, they should do some basic validation to figure out what the data means and how it was analyzed (and what flaws it might entail).

matthuggins 12y ago

The city search thing doesn't work right as far as I can tell. I live in Louisville, CO, but it was showing users from Louisville, KY.

csl 12y ago

The cool thing is, of course, to find like-minded people locally! It would be nice to be able to see results by specifying a geographic radius.

r3bl 12y ago
I agree with this. This might be an awesome way to connect with some local developers. Unfortunately, the location feature is practically useless (for now) as proven multiple times here in the comments section. Another proof: My city is actually called Brčko, but most of the people around here just use generic English keyboard and they type in Brcko instead. Of course, they're considered as two different cities.

ehamberg 12y ago

There's a bug with the city/country detection: People with only a country as their location, e.g. “Norway” are detected as being in “Norway, United States”. :-)

lucisferre 12y ago

I run most of my projects under an organization so this doesn't really work. Also stars aren't really a great measure of anything after a point. Perfect example are the json-jwt and ruby-jwt gems. The latter gets more stars because it is arguably easier for people to find even though the former is a far more complete and robust implementation of the JWT spec.

josegonzalez 12y ago
Same here. I contribute a large part of my OS time at the moment to CakePHP projects - under an org - and Dokku - under another person's username. Everytime I see a site that ranks developers based on github profiles, I cringe a bit. On that note, I'm apparently the 3rd top PHP developer in NYC. That strikes me as a bit odd, as Phil Sturgeon is also in the area. I guess they don't count "Bristol & Brooklyn" as NYC :)
welder 12y ago
We're trying to bridge the gap between private repos and public profiles. Nobody sees the work you put into your org-repos, but that work can still be shown on our leaderboard at https://wakatime.com/leaders https://wakatime.com/leaders
- lucisferre 12y ago
  They aren't private repos, they are just open source projects I keep under my organization instead of my own account.
  - welder 12y ago
    Oh got it. The good thing is WakaTime tracks the time you spent coding independently of the repo. We just use your repo when cross-referencing time spent per commit, but your public profile is populated even if you never use version control. P.S. The current profile is basic but here's what it will look like soon: http://www.reddit.com/r/WakaTime/comments/2uqgww/mockup_new_profile_page/ http://www.reddit.com/r/WakaTime/comments/2uqgww/mockup_new_...

cheshire137 12y ago

Why does it think Kentucky is in Australia? My profile: https://github.com/moneypenny https://github.com/moneypenny

nightbrawler 12y ago
It also thinks 'New Mexico' is in Mexico.
privong 12y ago
Confused geo-assignment, I guess. There is a Kentucky in Australia: http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/-30.7589/151.4659 http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/-30.7589/151.4659

vkjv 12y ago

This appears to be improperly including the stars from repositories that you forked.

fiatjaf 12y ago

Thank you! I was almost doing this myself, but you did it first, now I'm free! How much did it take? Too much data? How much? How did you get it?

vdaubry 12y ago
Glad you like it ! The database is about 20GB. All details about the import are on the readme : https://github.com/vdaubry/github-awards https://github.com/vdaubry/github-awards

LukeB_UK 12y ago

I don't think it takes into account the country, just the city. I live in Halifax, UK and it compared me with people in Halifax, Canada. Edit: Also, I have more than 1 star on my projects, yet it just reports 1?

flurdy 12y ago
At least it finds a Halifax. My location is set as Hampshire which it has never heard of, and for some reason it compared me to other Scala people in Guyana, the country. :) Though meetup.com is not much better. Their geoip correctly identifies my town as Alton, Hampshire, then shows all the meetups near the village Alton in Staffordshire... Facebook is not much better. My town is not an accepted location but any of the surrounding villages are... Geoip and location is hard.
- juliengrimal 12y ago
  Maybe you should move out of your city ? ;)

tessierashpool 12y ago

according to this site, I'm the #1 developer in Mexico for a ton of languages. in reality, I'm not in Mexico. similar comments abound: "I live in Halifax, UK and it compared me with people in Halifax, Canada." "I'm only detected as having 34 Ruby stars when one of my Ruby projects has ~6,700 stars." another comment: "[the site is] in breach of the Github name and branding usage guidelines." this thing is a mess, and I'm about to get a ton of emails from recruiters who want to me to work in Mexico now. on the bright side, at least I'll get to practice my Spanish.

count 12y ago
It's only pulling the first part - my profile says 'Van down by the river' and it put me in 'Van, Turkey'. Hilarious. Good to know I'm #1 Python guy of all the hobos down by the river!
- tessierashpool 12y ago
  congratulations! achievement unlocked.

kristopolous 12y ago

What the? I'm one of the top css people? time to change my resume!