I saw that earlier in the year - it's a nice idea, but I can't help but think there's a significant portion of people who aren't on GitHub (for example, I have an account, but the majority of my projects are on BitBucket, mostly due to technology choices).

Still, it's certainly a reasonable initial source of people, and I would imagine you'll find that a lot of the "good" programmers who aren't in this list are only a couple of real-life connections away, at most.