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est

I sometimes get tagged on Github as a timezone.

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How did you even get that username? Short ones go so fast, you must have been in the first 1000 users!

Looks like they were #23,570 (see the URL https://github.com/est.png redirects to)

https://api.github.com/users/est

They created their account at "2008-09-07T22:46:14Z"

That shows up as a picture of a worm for me.

Edit: aha! The link forwards to https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/23570?v=4

https://api.github.com/users/est might be easier to read for getting the ID.

Seems like I'm just slightly older (230381) with a two letter username.

My ID is #2,715,751 and I still somehow have a 5-letter username

Same for #7,xxx,xxx. The space grows exponentially with the number of letters though.

4 letters at #8,016,155: https://api.github.com/users/jmoo

I somehow ended up with #510,566 https://api.github.com/users/smcl but I don't think I was a particularly early adopter.

I joined two years after they started which is earlier than I realised. And apparently we're both relatively early adopters given that there's supposedly >100,000,000 users now.

Mine is 23000ish and I still couldn't get "Stavros" (a friend got it first).

EDIT: Wait, how? His ID is 500k or so. Hmm.

Name recycle. For a while I had a username monitoring tool. Names drop, just like domains.

Hmm, I'll need to make sure that GitHub's Stavros... retires, then.

It will be an accident, that much is certain.

I have a two-letter github username and I wasn't even an early adopter. I only bothered creating an account when it was clear that Github was more than a fad and a few of the projects I contributed to moved there. I tried just my initials and it worked.

Having a two-letter username is less exciting than simply a common word or name, though. Once in a while I get mentioned by accident in issues, or added to some organization. Twice I have had someone beg me to give it to them under the rationalization that it was "really cool" and I wasn't really "doing anything" with it...

EDIT: I just looked up my ID and apparently none of the first half-million people to sign up for a github account tried to brute-force the small-username space.

EDIT2: There are a few single-letter usernames with IDs in the millions, so I wonder if those are somehow "kept in reserve" by github admins and given out to friends or what's the story there.

There are 17576 three-letter combinations in the English alphabet.

Not to mention all the one- and two-letter combinations!

Well there’s about 1/26th as many of those.

There are some more three-character user names if you count dashes and digits, which are also allowed in GitHub usernames. Although I think the first one has to be a letter of the alphabet.

I have a file by each of those names inwhich each bit represents one article that either has the string or not (1 or 0)

I'm sure someone wanted to know that.

I got tzs and based on the tzs.png redirect URL trick from another comment I was number 322633.

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