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Show HN: Git-brag shows stargazers from important companies

github.com

94 pointsminxomat31 comments

> The code uses browser automation because creating a RegEx pattern for all weird-as-heck "company" names is hard.

That doesn't explain why web scraping is used instead of using the GitHub API, which is more kosher.

With the API, query all Stargazers, then query the user profiles of those users.

For unauthenticated requests, this will only work if n < 60, but for authenticated requests, the sky is the limit.

I have an old GitHub repo that essentially implements this and I believe it still works: https://github.com/minimaxir/get-profile-data-of-repo-starga...

It only needs a tweak to support the company field, and I might do just that if there is enough demand.

Well, I'd like to see what the banner for other projects look like without auth-ing the API (and 60 requests seems a bit low for that). I really just hacked this together on a train without further thought put into it. Sorry again for that.

I believe it's 5000 reqs/hr with an access token.

Kind of unfortunate, but it works. There's always room for improvement. Good eye, that's a fairly big implementation detail.

This is cool but if this becomes widespread it would make me less likely to star repositories. If people use this to brag "X company is (interested in/potentially using) my code", then my starring of their repository turns it from personal interest to corporate endorsement.

Hmm, I agree with you on that. This was my thinking behind appreciate [1], that starring would be a personal token of appreciation rather than an endorsement by the employer.

[1] https://github.com/musically-ut/appreciate

Quite interesting; maybe "github-brag" would be better, as it's unfortunately of little interest to us git users who avoid github.com :)

What is a "stargazer" in this context? I've never heard this term used in the context of software development before.

The star button on Github is kind of similar to "liking" a repo. Stargazers, I'm guessing, are the group of people that have clicked the star button on a repo.

I agree with your interpretation here, but at my workplace the phrase 'Stargazers' means someone who does greenfield research - something quite different.

I believe GitHub officially used that term to those who starred a repo. Their API uses the term anyway: https://developer.github.com/v3/activity/starring/#list-star...

It's the terminology github users in their API for people who have starred a project:

    GET /repos/:owner/:repo/stargazers

Yeah, sorry for the language choice here. Again, just a 5min project. Cheers.

Would be nice to at least have some installation instructions and what dependencies the project has. Right now it's just a list of usage commands.

Right now it only works on Windows, but it could easily be ported to a more portable language. The appveyor.yml has the powershell commands it takes to install AutoIt and build the project.

This is great, installed, thanks!

Now to brag: https://github.com/louthy/language-ext/

This is a great idea, kudos! You should consider extending it to *nix systems.

Also like someone here mentioned, it might be good to extend the Fortune 500 with a community contributed list of companies.

Currently setting up badge service. The problems with an entirely community-driven list is that for a large amount of companies, there has to be some scoring mechanism for ones that are more important than others.

That may be too subjective. I mean, if I'm in another country, maybe local companies are more important?

That's exactly the issue at hand.

This would be really cool as a repo badge. What do you think?

I might (I'm pretty sure) rewrite this in a more portable way and add an SVG renderer for a badge. Right now the list only contains the F500 companies and some FOSS-centred ones. That may need extending.

Could you build this as a service on https://stdlib.com/search ? Would make it portable for anybody without having to clone. (Disclaimer: Founder)

Just some feedback — it's kind of hard to understand what your product really is. If the idea is "Heroku for microservices on top of AWS Lambda" I feel like you might want to call that out somewhere to make it clearer.

Awesome. Thank you for the feedback! Always working on improving messaging. :)

Would have liked this to give me the usernames of those stargazers. Could imagine it might be useful if you are looking for work and have a popular github repo.

I don't think bothering people who just starred (i.e. not even watched/follow) your repo (correct me if I misunderstood your intention here) is a good way to get a job. But that's just my 2ct.

You can always browse the stargazers by just clicking the starcount. You can also slightly modify the code to not truncate the array.

Yeah you are right, it's not a strong bond by any means, but it at least helps if you were going to email them an intro.

It would make a lovely web app.

Unstable badge API added. Bug fixed.

Nice. It should also give you a brag score.

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