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120 pointswolfparade82 comments

As far as I can tell, this equates 'best programmers' with people who run repositories for popular projects.

I suppose if you think Justin Bieber and various top of the charts pop stars are the best musicians it makes sense.

I think that good programmers can be involved in popular projects but being involved in a popular project on github shouldn't be the defining characteristic of a 'good programmer'.

I think that it depends on what you're hiring for. This is analogous to Gladwell's, "there is no perfect pepsi, only perfect pepsis"

Ideally, githire should let one select from a few different hiring algorithms, which rank people differently.

Malcolm Gladwell is not a management consultant.

All I know is that if I put in Austin, Tx, I see a few people that I know in the top 10 to be really good software developers.

However, these are the types of people who generally start their own projects, and attract other good developers to a project. Their salaries are also going to be quite a bit higher than the average developer as well.

So, it seems to me that project popularity is at least some indicator that a person is competent as a software developer, but I can think of a lot of jobs that wouldn't require someone to be in the top 10.

I think that it would be great to be able to be able to search by code quality, test coverage, etc., but I don't think that we have the AI metrics to do that yet, and unfortunately, a real human has to look at someone's code to decide if it's any good.

However, this reminds me of software that tries to detect what "reading level" a person is writing at. For example, google lets you search by "reading level". It would be an interesting project for someone to apply the same principles to software.

It's a threshold filter. If you can create and maintain a project that's actually useful to people, you are definitely not a bozo. (NB: if you haven't done so, it doesn't mean you're a bozo; the implication only goes one way).

It's a better filter than "attended a super-elite university".

1) Searched for "San Francisco, CA" and it was returning people from India.... ?

2) Its 2011, githire.com should work the same as www.githire.com. This is my biggest pet peeve with any site.

3) The "add info" button on a user page goes to http://www.githire.com/user/edit which simply loads the user info for a username of edit on github.

Overall an interesting idea, but maybe unveiled a bit prematurely.

Its 2011, githire.com should work the same as www.githire.com. This is my biggest pet peeve with any site.

Agreed. At the very least, either CNAME one to the other. If you really want/need one canonical domain, it's not hard to define a 301 redirect to the appropriate domain.

Also, page 2 and on show people for different locations (eg. I searched for "Melbourne, Australia" and got some people from there, but the next page is Tokyo, and the next one is... Oregon? Refresh the page... get Texas. Location coordinates haven't changed though.

Don't pitch the value of your product with "We have a very high tech algorithm" until it works. Invoking the "secret sauce" when your basic functionality doesn't work is amateur-hour stuff, and degrades the benefit of the doubt that people otherwise give a new product.

This project feels like it's about halfway to MVP. This is more akin to a tech demo.

All that said, equating inbound connections with programmer ability is an inherently flawed metric for measuring how hireable a person is.

That seems to be all they're offering that's different from github's advanced search: https://github.com/search?type=Users&language=Python&...

But the order of that is based upon the number of followers, which isn't usually proportional to being a good Githubber.

I like that DHH barely makes page 2 while his baby is #5 on the best page[1].

[1] http://www.githire.com/best

I'm mildly confused. What repository is listed alongside a user? My user (http://www.githire.com/user/Shadowfiend ) shows a repository that, to my knowledge, I've never created, forked, or contributed to...

I have the same problem with my own page on this site.

On my page it finds a different person.

Ditto (username telemachus which points to the user derekprior instead?!?)

Actually, now my profile has been updated, and it now points to Linus Torvalds. Snapshot for posterity: http://cl.ly/C23P

Edit: Don't believe the pretender i386 below me. I am the true Linus Torvalds! :)

I'm really flattered - apparently I am Linus! http://www.githire.com/user/i386

I'm Linus as well: http://www.githire.com/user/Diablo-D3

Me too.

No, I'm Linacus! http://www.githire.com/user/MostAwesomeDude

Failed Execution. Take it down and fix it up. Do at least some testing before launching.

The biggest failure is that wrong information is showing up for peoples username. Thing is, if the username does not yet exist in your data set, then query it before showing someone else's profile.

Popularity does not show how good software developer is, we are not celebrities, some of us are not even bloggers. Some of us do not actively participate on open source, even if we have few repositories in Github. Though we still might be looking for work.

Funny. Now my own profile has been fetched from github.

The edit info, button still goes to user/edit instead of user/nickname/edit.

Still the system is showing those who are listed as "hireable: false" showing up before those who are actually hireable.

The search result ordering is odd. There's no reason for gitrank, if it does not affect the order the github users are shown.

I actually love this based on easy of finding cool programmers in my area using languages I can play with. Yea, this sounds silly if you're in SF, but in Columbus, Ohio, finding cool programmers that dig FoSS and interpreted languages is tricky. Too many people doing Java, .NET and Oracle stuff at Nationwide and similar. Too few people doing fun things.

THANK YOU to whoever made this.

I always thought Columbus had a pretty good tech scene going on? EdgeCase, Leandog, etc always represent at conferences and such.

Problem is in a single sentence you've got almost all of it covered :)

So much here (too much for my tastes) is around manufacturing and the insurance industry.

Looks like Columbus already has a Python and a Ruby usergroup. What more could you ask for?

Here in Memphis we had neither until last night, and cool people came out of the woodwork to see MemphisPython's first meeting. They weren't even all Python fans, really. I'm hoping it'll be a flashpoint for us.

So how is this different from Klout's "high tech super-secret ranking algorithm" that everyone knows is worthless?

GitRank, is based on the pagerank algorithm. Check out the best see if they don't match who you think should be there. http://www.githire.com/best

Is it this one :) ?

http://www.michael-noll.com/projects/spear-algorithm/

Sure. For example:

http://www.githire.com/user/tom3q has a bunch of repos and a score of 2.79.

http://www.githire.com/user/ukanga has basically nothing and a score of 5.33.

So it's based on inbound links (aka popularity)?

If it is, it becomes an SEO game, which defeats the purpose of such a ranking system. I'd rather hire someone who is passionate about something, designs well, and writes good code. Their page ranking doesn't help me with that.

All I really see here is a "who's who" of the popular kids.

Hey, there's MVP, and then there's buggy as hell. Yours falls into the latter. I've loaded 'my' user profile now a half dozen refreshes, and I only saw myself once.

It'd be great if you went back and had a good look at your code, and how you got here. Less rush == better product == higher chance of traction.

Currently showing Linus on my page. Bug, or feature? :) http://www.githire.com/user/derek

My page also shows Linus.

Same here.... http://www.githire.com/user/aantix

I dislike how basic functionality like this is completely broken, yet ads are being served. You can see where the priorities are. :(

Aside from the constructive criticism, it might help usability is you made your algorithm more transparent so users could see why they are essentially irrelevant (if they expected otherwise) and why some others are getting what appears to be arbitrarily high rankings. But, I do like this idea, and it would certainly benefit me if you found a way to make it universally indicative of a coder's skill. But that's hard. 1. It's still hard to tell without sitting a hacker down and testing them, 2. popularity does affect page rank. Some highly useful repositories are lost in a sea of absolutely useless, but popular programming playthings.

This is similar to what Matt Biddulph wrote back in 2010. See here:

https://github.com/mattb/flotsam/tree/master/github-recruitm...

this is actually where the idea came from.

This sounds like it's supposed to be for hiring, but a quick search for Toronto had 7 of the top 10 as not hireable (according to their profile).

Bug? Missing feature of MVP? Missing filter option?

hmmm, seems I'm entirely irrelevant, with a GitRank of: N/A. Better not tell my employer.

I'm not sure whether this is due to my profile not being indexed or that its rank is so low so as to be negligible.

Would be nice if they explained their ranking system better. (On the site itself)

It looks like they are still crawling the GitHub pages.

Cool idea! - though the projects that show up next to users don't correspond with those users, as I would assume they're supposed to?

The blog link parsing is off. If the blog value doesn't have an "http:// on it, then it treats it as a relative link under githire.com. E.g.:

   Blog: mechanicalgirl.com

links to http://www.githire.com/mechanicalgirl.com

The idea is great, but the implementation is totally broken presently. I tried two times with "Montreal, QC" as a query, the first time it returned only result from London (UK) and the second time only Philadelphia (PA).

So lets pretend project popularity is a good measure for programmers. But what if somebody is contributing to other popular projects or is part of an organization that has popular projects?

NB: It seems you have your DNS/subdomains set up incorrectly. githire.com returns nothing while www.githire.com works. Be sure to set one of them to the canonical url for seo purposes.

honestly DNS still confuses me a bit. I have a CNAME record pointing www to the ec2 public url. What do I do for the naked domain?

Set up an A record and point it directly at the IP address.

Edit: on EC2, much better to set up an elastic IP as described below.

Careful not to put an ec2 host IP address directly in your DNS provider. Given the caching in DNS, if/when you change EC2 instances you'll be given a new IP, and your site will be down (or looking at the old server) while DNS updates.

Better to use amazon's Elastic IP. Simply 1) create one, 2) assign it to the EC2 instance of your choice, 3) add the Elastic IP as your A record as the parent post suggests.

I'm a bit confused how this works.

I searched for my location and couldn't find myself.

I tried my page directly at http://www.githire.com/user/jl2 and see my "GitRank" is N/A. I clicked "Add Info" and was taken to another user's page: http://www.githire.com/user/edit

Is it a bug? Did this happen for anybody else?

Nice idea :) I have been working on a blog post and example app for how to do this with Gremlin and Neo4j -- should be up soon.

I'm sure you're working to fix a couple of issues with your app, so I'm not trying to pile on here. Love the idea, and I just wanted to report two bugs:

1. githire.com/user/acompa returns my account, while www.githire.com/user/acompa returns someone else.

2. Clicking "Add Info" on my profile

githire.com/user/acompa

takes me to the profile of user "edit" via

githire.com/user/edit

You might need to construct your URLs more consistently, it seems?

Looks like they are in 503 land right now...

Good. As interesting an idea as this is, it'll just be exploited by worthless, lazy recruiters.

503 as well over here...

Nothing but 503 for every city I try

Nobody has mentioned the name.

A simple "Doesn't do exactly what it says on the tin" disclaimer would probably suffice...

How exactly does GitRank work?

Also, the add info doesn't seem to do anything.

BUG: If you click add info on a user page, it goes to /user/edit rather than /user/<username>/edit

Finally, the repo next to me is some uni project that I haven't updated for about a year, why is it showing that? :(

Small bug, "add info" button takes you to http://www.githire.com/user/edit which belongs to the github user https://github.com/edit

This thing is a joke. Searched for Atlanta Georgia and came across someone who had no open source contributions on and three skeleton projects as a top guy while high profile open source contributors were not in the system.

There's something wrong. http://www.githire.com/user/parse has rank of 10 and doesn't own the project shown on the page.

Can't even find my username (ahmetalpbalkan). I think it requires more testing on the ranking algorithm and probably more input parameters to compute rank.

I tried searching for local Ruby guys, and some of the top Django/Python people I know showed up at the top of the list.

It might need some tweaking.

Seems to me you don't have enough information to declare "Hireable: false." I don't have much of a github presence. I am hireable.

Looks like is not showing the commits on other projects or the organizations you belong to. It's an interesting idea though.

Somebody should do the same for Dribbble.

we're definitely thinking about that. and forrst.

Dribbble already does it natively: http://dribbble.com/designers

For a glorified search engine, why does this require Javascript to return a static page set of results?

Searching 'detroit' gives results from Munich. Searching 'detroit, mi' gives Zurich.

Quick, try "Turkey". You might get a Sandwich!

For Palo Alto it gives me only non-hireable people. And Facebook.

I found a good candidate then saw this: Hireable: false

:( I will look again ...

Oh please let companies use this to determine "real" talent!

Just got my first Github spam message today. Coincidence? Is this being used as a spam tool?

Anyone else got something like this in all caps? <<GREETING TO YOU AND YOUR FAMILY, IN MY SEARCH FOR A... >>

We've had a similar project live for a little while now. It's opt-in only though.

http://www.workforpie.com/

nice idea but poor implementation.

by the way, it would be good if users categorized by programming languages.

Good use of twitter bootstrap!

Search takes ~30 seconds and returns no results or "503 Service Unavailable"

Does not look viable.

There are some problems with the search engine, if i search by "Bogota" there is no result from my city... and it give me exactly the same results if i write "Colombia".

Maybe you should use the Google API: http://goo.gl/H5cGY

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