Show HN: I built a tool to find devs based on code, not LinkedIn titles | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I built a tool to find devs based on code, not LinkedIn titles

gitmatcher.com

86 pointsNabilChiheb71 comments

Hey HN

After years working in software engineering and helping with hiring, I noticed a frustrating pattern:

Companies often rely on résumés and LinkedIn titles to find developers instead of looking at what they've actually built.

So I built GitMatcher.

It analyzes GitHub profiles to surface developers based on:

Their public repos

Commit history

Originality and usefulness of code

Patterns that show consistency and real skill

No keywords. No job titles. Just code.

GitMatcher is useful if you're:

- A recruiter tired of resume roulette

- A founder looking for a technical co-founder

- An OSS maintainer searching for genuine contributors

It’s still early, so I’d love your feedback especially around what signals you’d care about most when discovering devs.

Open articleView on HN

GitHub profile is not a CV.

A few things that immediately jumped at me:

- Not all code is on GitHub and not all of it is public. Recently I see more and more code moving elsewhere: GitLab (both managed and self-hosted), Codeberg, Forgejo instances.

- Even the code that is on GH might live outside of personal profile. Many notable FLOSS projects have their own organisations on GH. People who produce a lot of that code have direct commit access and don’t keep forks on their profiles. You’re missing all of the most prolific developers here.

- Location field in a GH profile is full of jokes. Search for “space”, “internet”, “/dev/null”, etc.

- It picks top repos weirdly. I tried to find my profile. It picked one repo that is not in my profile and wasn’t there probably for a long time, and another that is a public archive and hasn’t been updated since 2017. Both are forks with minimal contributions on my part. I have pinned repos in my profile that are much fresher and, arguably, more relevant.

But the project looks sleek. Probably helpful in addition to Linkedin and whatever to uncover more potential candidates. I’m glad it works for you.

This is an interesting idea, but it didn't work for me. I tried "Zig developer" and it showed results that hadn't done much Zig work recently.

Developers known for their zig work like mitchellh, matklad, and Jarred-Sumner weren't in the results at all.

Thanks for your feedback will take a look? are you looking for zig developer? or you were just testing?

Just testing.

Small feedback: I would like to be able to enter my own profile to see how I will appear on the site. It would also be nice to know what searches my profile would be most likely to pop up for.

Okay I was able to find myself, but only by searching for the exact text in my GitHub bio. Nothing related to any of my repos surfaced my profile.

Honestly, I’m against this.

As soon as that is added, people will start to try to optimise their profiles to place them high in the list on certain things, rendering the tool pretty much useless.

The talent people want to find in the talent that doesn’t do everything in its power to say “hey, look at me, I’m talent”, but just… well… does things.

I'm finding profiles where the only reference to the thing I was searching for (PyTorch in this case) is in their profile text. None of their repos or commit history seem to use pytorch. I also refuse to believe that there is only one developer using pytorch in all of Stockholm.

I love the concept, but it seems to struggle with judging what code/text relevant and important

My public repos on GitHub are not a good way to judge me as a candidate. Not even close.

Frankly, I don't have much time to contribute to open source these days. I send a PR maybe once a year.

Almost everything on my profile is from my university days, and none of it is related to my career specialty (ML SRE).

And my employer asks me to fill out a form before I publish personal projects, so that they can be sure it is unrelated to my job (and thus that they do not have a patent or copyright claim over the code). This means most of my weekend projects simply aren't public, because I can't be bothered to do the paperwork.

LinkedIn, on the other hand, clearly shows where I've worked and what I've worked on. It's a much more accurate resume for me that GitHub.

I completely understand your situation. GitHub isn't the perfect fit for everyone, especially for those in specialized roles like ML SRE

GitMatcher is primarily aimed at the sourcing stage, where recruiters can find devs based on their actual code contributions. But I agree, it's not a one-size-fits-all solution — it's not meant to replace LinkedIn or fully capture your career.

I think the problem runs deeper than that. What you’ve done is an interesting tool for finding out more about a relatively small slice of developers.

Then clearly you would be ranked very low by something like this. I think that is the whole point of this: tell the people who have solid commit history from those who don't.

But the ranking is not reflective of actual skills. That's the critique. Aside from very frequent open source contributors (and I think these people are the minority of devs), devs will tend to be "profiled" by this tool according to the dot scripts, university projects, Advent of Code, or other half-hearted projects they happen to have put on their Github. (Maybe I'm just projecting...)

The issue isn't that not everyone has a Github presence, the issue is that for most people their Github presence is somewhat unrepresentative of their actual job skills.

It is one dimension of many showing amounts of practice. I understand why that makes people sad, but that sadness just feels narcissistic.

I might be interested on people who can help me solve my particular problem. Those people might not be the same who have lots of commits on Github.

Then, logically, you would not hire them solely based on this one tool.

Same here. I don't care to publish my personal projects on Github and my work projects aren't there for obvious reasons.

I think a tool like this would be targeted more towards eliminating false positives, rather than eliminating false negatives.

I think this tool as a whole is probably an awful way to judge a candidate. But that's not really the point. The point is to find additional candidates with a low false negative rate.

E.g. over the past year I've written tens of thousands of lines of zig code. But that's not on my resume nor my LinkedIn. this would allow someone to include me. Is the code good, or am I a good candidate? Impossible to tell... Ah, but now you have heard of me! :D

There's more fluff on the page, but it's just fluff, and safe to ignore.

> And my employer asks me to fill out a form before I publish personal projects, so that they can be sure it is unrelated to my job (and thus that they do not have a patent or copyright claim over the code). This means most of my weekend projects simply aren't public, because I can't be bothered to do the paperwork.

Your employer is bad and they should feel bad! If you have the option you should consider changing to an employer less willing to make the world worse... or maybe a jurisdiction where that toxicity is unenforceable.

over the past year I've written tens of thousands of lines of zig code. But that's not on my resume

why not?

i have included every significant contribution to any project, whether it is paid or not on my CV. why would i leave that out? it's experience. only code that i write for my own use and don't publish may not be worth to be listed

Because it's across a few projects and none of them are popular enough to be worth listing.

> Your employer is bad and they should feel bad!

For the record, my employer is Google.

They call this process the Invention Assignment Review Committee or IARC.

From what I understand, the process is not actually enforceable anyway. Code I write related to my job is owned by them; other code I write is owned by me. I don't necessarily have to go through their process for this to be true. And their lawyers certainly know this.

I've done it once, and the process is lightweight. And I probably could ignore it in practice with no one actually caring. But the fact that the process even exists is enough of a blocker that I don't readily publish my hobby projects anymore, and that's kinda shitty.

> I've done it once, and the process is lightweight. And I probably could ignore it in practice with no one actually caring. But the fact that the process even exists is enough of a blocker that I don't readily publish my hobby projects anymore, and that's kinda shitty.

and they know this, and that's the point... there's a reason people talk about the chilling effects of shitty, but not technically illegal behavior

> For the record, my employer is Google.

Yeah, I knew that from your hn profile. Which caused me to ask a friend, also SRE at google, how onerous it was, he said basically the exact same thing you did, just intrusive enough his github is also completely empty.

I wonder what cool stuff doesn't exist today because of it

Yes, I'm in the same situation. The majority of my work is on private repositories, even though I've contributed to public repositories for many years. This tool wouldn't accurately reflect my current skills.

When I search the results are not quite what I would expect. I have just under 10,000 commits in TypeScript language and my location is listed as Dallas/Fort Worth.

When I search for TypeScript with location Fort Worth there is only one result. When I change the location to Dallas there are 10 results. Search cannot resolve results for Dallas/Fort Worth with any combination of white space.

As a bonus candidate search tools never include a "negative search", as in results to exclude. For example: TypeScript, but not React.

I have to ask- you're not interested in candidates if they have experience in certain frameworks?

It was just an example, but yes, I would like to disqualify results that I don't want. It is just a general feature I wish were widely available in many places. If I were looking for jobs, for example, I would not want to waste time on that which is not relevant or outside my level.

If you were looking for jobs and had Typescript experience but not React experience, then sure, you might want to exclude jobs that require React experience.

An employer looking for a candidate has no reason to exclude someone with React experience though. If they want a candidate with Express.js experience, candidates may still have both. They just need the positive search in that case.

I think the belief is that they think that knowing some framework/language/tool etc. is harmful, i.e a candidate not knowing that would be better, has some better habits, and so on. I've saw that come up a few times

> An employer looking for a candidate has no reason to exclude someone with React experience though

I completely disagree and you are focusing on a made up rhetorical example far too much. There is always benefit to more efficiently excluding results you don't want.

i'd like to see an example that actually makes sense. the only one i can come up with is that i might not want to hire people who have more experience with windows than with linux. but even in that example people with less windows experience would be ok.

if you have a realistic use case please describe it.

Yeah, if you're hiring for a senior-level role, 10 years of experience with Linux is 10 years of experience with Linux, even if the person also has experience (perhaps even more than 10 years) with Windows.

> i'd like to see an example

Why? You are clearly missing the point and lack imagination. Another example won't satisfy you the way you think it will.

The obvious problem here is the vast majority of software professionals in the US are not working on open source projects. So this tool is probably only useful if you’re looking for an open source dev or someone junior trying to break into the industry.

Basically all of the major tech companies have boilerplate hoops you need to jump through to make open source contributions on the side, let alone open source anything major internally.

It surfaces accounts because they've forked repos and done nothing or pushed demo applications from tutorials.

Similar to what I'm doing with https://wonderful.dev (example dev profile: https://wonderful.dev/alan) where profiles can't be edited, devs can only connect their GitHub, StackOverflow, etc. and we fill in the profile for them with real data. No more fake Linkedin skills.

This difference here is wonderful.dev adds points to skills based on repo stars. We take a dev's contributions to a repo, times that repo's stars, then assign those points to the repo's languages on the dev's profile. It's a proxy for impact by language.

It's already flagged me as a tech influencer because I mostly make PRs to existing projects, which doesn't seem to be pulled into the AI summary.

I love the concept though. Banning people from writing their own profiles makes it feel more objective/accurate even when it's not.

One problem with this is my day job work (99.9% of my experience) isn't publicly posted and wouldn't be captured in the profile. The nature of my personal projects are significantly different than my job and result in different technologies being used to better fit the use case. Also, most of my personal projects are private and would be left out.

I guess this is just one more thing I feel is a barrier to equitable evaluation and hiring practices.

When connecting GitHub, it asks you to select the repos you want wonderful.dev to see. You can select private repos there too.

Depends on how private you want them to be.

Yes, the names and language stats are seen but the integration scope we use doesn't have permission to read the repo source code.

I love this! I'm reading through the criticism in the comments and I can't help but imagine all of the articles out there complaining about how the interview process is broken - sure enough even one tool that is slightly different than the standard interview process and what do people do? complain about its short comings.

Keep it up and iterate! This is a good direction, and it certainly is going to be useful for some teams :)

the problem with the interview process is that it is unfair, not properly capturing the actual qualifications and testing the wrong stuff. the complaints here are that this tool does not properly capture the actual qualifications either, and therefore it suffers from the same problem, just in a different way. it may work for a few people, just like the interview process works for a few people, and it may work for a few use cases (like finding a FOSS developer) but it doesn't provide a solution for the interview problem itself.

@NabilChiheb: Please note that your CSS URL is currently an infinite redirection loop:

  $ curl -D - 'https://gitmatcher.com/assets/index-CKQ82hdV.css'
  HTTP/2 301 
  date: Tue, 08 Apr 2025 15:58:51 GMT
  location: https://gitmatcher.com/assets/index-CKQ82hdV.css
  ...

What if they just fork a lot of stuff/not change it

I also have a self-updating github readme, it commits everyday

How do you work around people just pushing clones of existing software to their repos?

I agree with most of the sentiment here, and have actually considered building something like this myself. I think the biggest need is to find a way to expose contributions to private repositories somehow—right now, this assumes you are your public commits, which isn't true for people spending the majority of their time inside of private repos.

I know the LinkedIn API is limited but it would also be cool to see a social graph of contributors you have worked with somehow. Finding the people, their titles, and companies would be valuable to see where you level (just imho).

I believe github used to have a service like this but they shut it down. I wish Gitlab and Github provide a paid api with this metadata so talent sources can reach put people based on contribution and experience.

When I search for "City, Country," I can find my profile, but searching for just "Country" doesn't work.

This is a good idea, but it needs more work on how to tokenize and index the profiles. Are you just using the API? or storing the profiles? because API for exact matches misses a lot of profiles. The location field in GitHub has been always been inconsistent, some people use country flag emojis instead of names, or just abbreviations like AR, BO, or USA, etc

This will completely rule out people who cannot contribute to personal GH repos for legal reasons.

It can also be gamed by just filling your repo with all sorts of stuff pulled from elsewhere.

Just to clarify, GitMatcher is primarily designed for the sourcing stage of recruitment — helping recruiters and hiring managers discover devs based on actual contributions rather than résumés or LinkedIn profiles.

It’s not meant to be the only tool in the hiring process, but rather to help make the first step more data-driven.

I appreciate your thoughts — it helps make GitMatcher better.

>Just to clarify, GitMatcher is primarily designed for the sourcing stage of recruitment — helping recruiters and hiring managers discover devs based on actual contributions rather than résumés or LinkedIn profiles.

Why would Github commits more significant when discovering people than LinkedIn CVS?

One contributes to GH is more-often tech or projects you're interest in, whilst a resume is going to be the alphabet soup of all tech you know.

HN is doing a good job of complaining about all the edge cases where this won't work because most of us don't contribute high-quality, novel work to GH. For example, for me, my recent GH contributions are for an ancient video game in a niche language I've never used elsewhere and my location isn't even exposed. So I won't show up. Boo hoo.

It's still a neat idea.

Or just AI-generate working code and fluff your public repos with that.

I wouldn't be interested in someone who can just write some code. I would be interested in someone with specific experience working on a commercial software product.

Also, while Github is big indeed, most public repositories are either concerned with open source software, are of low quality, are just cloning other software.

Most developers don't have their work in public git repositories.

Most of my code and the best of my work is owned by somebody else.

I cannot put it in github even if I wanted to since I was handsomely paid for it, so your tool can never find me.

This is true for some of the best devs for hire, in any case, the best way to find good candidate leads are networking and referrals.

I saw profiles across different searches which had no contact info listed, seems like it isn't really designed to be a hiring tool.

I'm very skeptical of the claim that you'll be able to identify people by "usefulness of code", whatever that means.

also most of the people found will not be interested in changing jobs. but github doesn't tell you that so they can't be filtered out.

Kinda mad I didn't show up when I searched my skills and location. Seems like people with those skills in their bio showed up first even though others may have more commits and their profile/repos have more recognition.

Could this work the other way round? For developers to look for companies?

that’s actually our next step! i'm exploring ways to match developers with companies based on shared values, tech stacks, and project interests

Found whopping 10 people in NYC with Python and JavaScript experience.

I keep trying to find myself: https://github.com/GWBasic

C# / Cape Cod: Nothing

Pogon / Cape Cod: Nothing

All of the links under "product" seem to be relative to whatever the current page is. That only works on the front page.

Who says these people are even looking for work?

Good point.

Although almost everyone has a price or list of things they would change about their current job.

I updated my location and it updated seemingly instantly. Are you doing API calls in real time or did I just happen to get lucky?

I'm doing real-time calls, but there's a one-hour query-based cache

Neat idea, but the execution seems terrible. I tried to find my coworkers based on specific searches and they never show up.

great concept and something like this is definitely needed, just unable to get a good search that demonstrates the power. i would keep trying to make this better!

you also might want to check all the links in your footer. all the social links are broken and the blog links to some generic content.

How many great devs are keeping their GH profile active to match your search patterns?

Just a heads-up, the site doesn't render in a usable way in FireFox.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com