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Show HN: Discover your ranking on GitHub

github-awards.com

137 pointspicsoung106 comments

I run most of my projects under an organization so this doesn't really work. Also stars aren't really a great measure of anything after a point. Perfect example are the json-jwt and ruby-jwt gems. The latter gets more stars because it is arguably easier for people to find even though the former is a far more complete and robust implementation of the JWT spec.

Same here. I contribute a large part of my OS time at the moment to CakePHP projects - under an org - and Dokku - under another person's username. Everytime I see a site that ranks developers based on github profiles, I cringe a bit.

On that note, I'm apparently the 3rd top PHP developer in NYC. That strikes me as a bit odd, as Phil Sturgeon is also in the area. I guess they don't count "Bristol & Brooklyn" as NYC :)

We're trying to bridge the gap between private repos and public profiles. Nobody sees the work you put into your org-repos, but that work can still be shown on our leaderboard at https://wakatime.com/leaders

They aren't private repos, they are just open source projects I keep under my organization instead of my own account.

Oh got it. The good thing is WakaTime tracks the time you spent coding independently of the repo. We just use your repo when cross-referencing time spent per commit, but your public profile is populated even if you never use version control.

P.S. The current profile is basic but here's what it will look like soon: http://www.reddit.com/r/WakaTime/comments/2uqgww/mockup_new_...

Surprised to see that I'm only detected as having 34 "Ruby" stars when one of my Ruby projects has ~6,700 stars, all told across all my projects I ought to have closer to 10k ★.

Fun project, but buggy data makes for a bit of a crappy user experience. Doesn't GH classify languages pretty well using it's Linguist project? The project with ~6,700 stars is correctly classified as [ Ruby 97.5% | HTML 2.5% ] (the 2.5% seems to be from documentation and templates, which in itself is already weird)

I understand that many people find gamification fun, but I know a lot of people who don't like ranked leaderboards, based on stupid things like "how many people bookmarked your project", it leads to unnecessary egotistical competition, and driving more barriers between us than we need. (Example, what benefit would we get from comparing stars on vim, and neovim?… so we could argue to one group of people that their work is less important than another group?)

same for me - plus it counts only half of my repos...

What is your GitHub username ?

GitHub Archive data are not perfect, and there are also room for improvements in the import process.

The stars are also inaccurate for me.

Username: nathanpeck

You are reporting 115 stars for JS, when I actually have 700+

Another thing to factor in to make this more accurate is to detect if repos are in a package system like bower or npm.

If so then factor in the downloads for those packages. For example one of my repos only has 100 stars, but gets nearly 10,000 downloads a month on NPM. Another has 600+ stars but only gets around 100-200 downloads a month.

'tis but a google away: https://github.com/leehambley The 6700 star repo he's talking about is capistrano/capistrano.

I asssume stars only apply for personal projects? Spin it off, lose your ranking. :)

A further step towards the gamification of Open Source development.

On the other hand, maybe that's Github's future business model: Rank Open Source slaves and sell that information to recruiters.

It sounds like you're opposed to the gamification; care to explain why? I'm curious.

Isn't it right there in his comment? Seems that he doesn't like the idea of having to work for free to "rank higher" if recruiters start to use these sorts of scores. Since no other profession has to work for free like this(see: the carpenter analogy), it seems a reasonable position.

It's already started, right? "Github is your resume" is often said; which sucks for those of us who work on enterprise software and private repos that can't be open sourced.

All kudos to those that can spare the time for, make their livelihood on, or have their company allow them to release, open source software.

I want to be like you, but unfortunately cannot.

> Since no other profession has to work for free like this

This is untrue, though. The concept of building a portfolio exists across all creative domains, and almost everyone builds that portfolio initially by doing the work for its own sake.

The biggest problem is that gamification tends to provide incentives to improve your efficiency in affecting the "game" portion, to the detriment of the actual thing being scored. As the game becomes more popular, the game becomes what is important.

that's a flaw in the design of a particular the game and not a flaw of gamification itself. What if you could only be rewarded by doing things properly? By trying to affect the outcome of the game you will be improving how you do things normally.

You seem to be under the impression that you think this project is owned by github.

I added in the footer a small note explaining that this project is not related to the GitHub company, do you think i should make that more visible ?

No, I never thought that. I was extrapolating what might happen when an (almost) monopolist like GitHub would start to mine, analyze, and sell data like Facebook.

I've always assumed that GitHub do that already, what makes you think they don't mine [meta-]data from users - is it in their articles of association or user agreement?

I've been thinking about this a lot recently. You wouldn't believe the number of people (VCs, marketers, recruiters, etc.) who strongly have pushed for a similar system implemented in GitHub over the years. The entire concept of open source on GitHub would have basically been a front to become a LinkedIn of developers.

I don't mind sites like the one here coming along and attempting to do this (it has some value), but I'm really proud that GitHub didn't head in this direction, even though there was a fair amount of pressure towards it.

I thought "gamification of open source development" was always a pretty major part of Github's business model. Frankly I don't know if that's a bad thing; I've certainly been motivated by trying to keep my "current streak" or whatever going on several occasions.

I don't think it takes into account the country, just the city. I live in Halifax, UK and it compared me with people in Halifax, Canada.

Edit: Also, I have more than 1 star on my projects, yet it just reports 1?

At least it finds a Halifax. My location is set as Hampshire which it has never heard of, and for some reason it compared me to other Scala people in Guyana, the country. :)

Though meetup.com is not much better. Their geoip correctly identifies my town as Alton, Hampshire, then shows all the meetups near the village Alton in Staffordshire...

Facebook is not much better. My town is not an accepted location but any of the surrounding villages are...

Geoip and location is hard.

Maybe you should move out of your city ? ;)

This is really neat and I love playing with stuff like this. But, fundamentally, it shows that stars aren't a good measure of anything besides stars, at least outside of the top scorers for commonly used languages. For those, it's not a bad proxy for fame.

If you like at the top javascript or ruby developers, yep, those are all pretty famous javascript and ruby developers. But if you look at the #6 matlab developer, well, turns out that's me. I've probably used matlab for less than 40 hours total, lifetime. And most of that was in grad school, a decade ago. Most of my stars come from a tutorial. Not a tutorial I created -- a tutorial I worked through, that thousands of people have probably done. Ok, so, not many people put matlab code on github, so that data is messy. What about popular languages?

Turns out I'm also the 240th most starred scala developer worldwide. I once used scala for two months and created some projects to help me learn that aren't even close to being polished enough to be useful to anyone. Like most code written by someone who's learning a language, it's not any good. But that somehow puts me at 240? Even in a pretty popular language, by the time you get into the hundreds worldwide (or the top few in most cities), it's people who just threw up some toy projects.

I wonder if this explains why I've been getting recruiters contacting me "because they saw my scala code on github". I doubt anyone who's actually seen my scala code on github would contact me for a scala position, but someone who uses a tool that counts stars might think that I actually know scala and contact me for a scala position. This particular tool is too new to be the source of that, but the page the source data comes from (github archive) shows how easy it is to make BigQuery queries to return results like this.

For Julia, I'm also presently ranked above all of the co-creators of Julia, despite having spent a total of perhaps 20 hours ever using the language (I'm 72, compared to the co-creators, who are 113, 143, and unranked).

BTW, in languages I've actually worked in professionally, I'm 98,582/244,375 in a language I used for years before it became trendy, 1,100/1,835 in a language I've used a lot recently, and 75,998/161,465 in a language I've used some recently. In the language I'm most proficient in, the language I'm mostly likely to reach for if I just want to get things done, I'm 14,800/25,094.

P.S. If the developer is reading this and wants bugreports, your service returns a "503 Service Unavailable" if you click the "top foo github developers in your city" for developers that don't have an associated city.

That might just say there is very little matlab code on github. Or matlab users don't use github stars much?

Perhaps a better label than 'top developer' would be 'developer of most popular repos' or something.

Or one person made 30 repos and stared them all himself once... giving the account 30 stars in some obscure language.

As another data point - in the Clojure space, I'm ranked right alongside Rich Hickey down in the 30s.

For those of you who aren't aware, Rich is the inventor and maintainer of the language.

This brings up something I've been grappling with. How do you get more eyeballs on your open source work? I have a few projects, as does my company, but getting more interest/stars seems like it requires a large investment - substantially larger than any benefit we'd likely derive.

"Back in the day" I remember it was as easy as sharing with a few friends or posting on HN, and it would quickly get some traction. Now it feels as if you need marketing clout.

Well, if you don't really care if anyone else uses your open source, then it doesn't really matter, right?

The reasons you might care are -- to get more contributors, to make the software more sustainable; fame for your yourself or your company (how valuable is this?); etc.

Being clear on what benefit (if any) you will get from the project being more popular will make it easier to guess whether the 'investment' will be worth the 'benefit'.

But how do you do it? I think you've got to not just 'advertise' in general interest places like HN. You've got to find the community of people who will find your code most useful (perhaps people in the same business domain as you are working), and advertise to them, sometimes direct one on one. Conferences and meet-ups are good for this.

I think you've also got to have really good docs, and really good release management practices (semver, no backwards compat bugs, no encouraging using off 'master' instead of a release, good release notes, etc).

And if still nobody is using it, then I guess they don't actually find your software useful!

Personally I have not found this difficult.

Get engaged with the community. Follow folks building stuff in your ecosystem on Twitter. Follow them on Github. Then mention them when you release something cool, make good screenshots and a nice intro. It takes one tweet about your project to go heavily retweeted before all sorts of people interested in your future work follow you, and so it goes on and on.

Of course this will only happen if your project is explained well, integrates into your ecosystem's package management, etc. Make sure it looks as tidy and maintained as other popular open source projects you know and love.

Finally, don't forget to star your own repos. This puts them into GH newsletter the next day (“starred by people you follow” section, assuming you already got someone following you), and also will put these repos on your profile page above your forks of other people's projects.

> "Finally, don't forget to star your own repos. This puts them into GH newsletter the next day (“starred by people you follow” section, assuming you already got someone following you), and also will put these repos on your profile page above your forks of other people's projects."

I was not aware of this. Thanks for the tip!

1. Solve something that hasn't already been solved well

2. Have a ton of examples in the repository

3. Use it in production in your own stuff

4. Keep a solid change log and upgrade guide

5. Ignore the stars, all of this is for your team.

It told me it coudln't identify my city from my github account. Indeed, i did not have "location" field filled out in my github profile. I went and filled it out. But it still says it cant' identify my city. Caching? Which hopefully will be refreshed at some point? Or do I need to fill out my location in a way other than I have?

Same problem here. I filled out my city just as other developers who show up for my city have done but it still says "We couldn't find your city from your location on github :("

Looking at the source repo, it is not using real-time API results. Probably have to wait for the devs to sync it again.

https://github.com/vdaubry/github-awards

Darnit, I'd be #4 in my city if only it recognized me!

It's surprising to me that so many in this thread are asking if these rankings are legit. Of course they aren't -- they operate on a simplification that trade accuracy for convenience. It's one developer's side project...many professional companies and analysts have failed to encapsulate the worth of a human being as a number, why should this developer be any better?

That said, I imagine a lot of headhunter companies use the same kind of heuristic, which is probably why I get so many unsolicited interview requests despite my lackluster activity (I'm in the top 200 developers of Ruby in New York, and #3200 in CSS...of the entire world)

Yep, and the location identification is pretty broken too.

I live in Columbia Missouri (MO) and the rankings for "Columbia" include folks from Columbia Maryland (MD) and Columbia South Carolina (SC).

So even if people want to use dashboard summary data like this, they should do some basic validation to figure out what the data means and how it was analyzed (and what flaws it might entail).

according to this site, I'm the #1 developer in Mexico for a ton of languages.

in reality, I'm not in Mexico.

similar comments abound: "I live in Halifax, UK and it compared me with people in Halifax, Canada." "I'm only detected as having 34 Ruby stars when one of my Ruby projects has ~6,700 stars."

another comment: "[the site is] in breach of the Github name and branding usage guidelines."

this thing is a mess, and I'm about to get a ton of emails from recruiters who want to me to work in Mexico now.

on the bright side, at least I'll get to practice my Spanish.

It's only pulling the first part - my profile says 'Van down by the river' and it put me in 'Van, Turkey'. Hilarious. Good to know I'm #1 Python guy of all the hobos down by the river!

congratulations! achievement unlocked.

There's a bug with the city/country detection:

People with only a country as their location, e.g. “Norway” are detected as being in “Norway, United States”. :-)

Is the score formula correct?

sum(stars) + (1.0 - 1.0/count(repositories))

So if I have 3000 stars and 10 repositories, you give me a score of 3000.9? Shouldn't it be multiplied?

It's for tiebreakers.

The city search thing doesn't work right as far as I can tell. I live in Louisville, CO, but it was showing users from Louisville, KY.

I am pretty surprised by my ranking in San Francisco :) 86 in Lua devs? not so many Lua devs around ...

Also, it seems that some of my repo are not taking into account, like https://github.com/picsoung/uberSlackBot which has 13 stars.

I am ranked N.1 for Lua in Paris and N.66 worlwide, but yes, there are not that many Lua devs on GitHub (the Open Source community is small).

We should take it as a chance to be #1 somewhere ;)

The stars information comes from GitHub Archive : https://www.githubarchive.org/

There are some limitations, for example it doesn't include events before 2011

The concept of "star" has also changed several times (they are still called watchers in the API)

I'm #1 in my town. :> It only sees 2 CL repositories though (of 10 or so):(.

Kind of question the validity of the rating. I'm supposedly ranked 2,390/161,465 world wide for C++ development. Yet, I have only been posting any code to github for the past year, and I know quite a few better C++ developers than me ranked way below me.

Wondering how you deal with city names in languages other that English? Is that taken into account?

For example, it seems that for Kraków (Poland) you have both Kraków and Cracow.

PS : Great project!

Why does it think Kentucky is in Australia? My profile: https://github.com/moneypenny

It also thinks 'New Mexico' is in Mexico.

Confused geo-assignment, I guess. There is a Kentucky in Australia: http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/-30.7589/151.4659

http://github-awards.com/users?language=c&type=world

Thank you! I was almost doing this myself, but you did it first, now I'm free! How much did it take? Too much data? How much? How did you get it?

Glad you like it ! The database is about 20GB. All details about the import are on the readme : https://github.com/vdaubry/github-awards

The cool thing is, of course, to find like-minded people locally!

It would be nice to be able to see results by specifying a geographic radius.

I agree with this. This might be an awesome way to connect with some local developers. Unfortunately, the location feature is practically useless (for now) as proven multiple times here in the comments section.

Another proof: My city is actually called Brčko, but most of the people around here just use generic English keyboard and they type in Brcko instead. Of course, they're considered as two different cities.

This appears to be improperly including the stars from repositories that you forked.

What the? I'm one of the top css people? time to change my resume!

Hi,

I'm vincent author of GitHub Awards, if you have any questions feel free to ask

It didn't detect my location correctly. I'm in the Boston area, not the UK:

http://github-awards.com/users/search?login=kylecronin

https://github.com/kylecronin

Also, it looks like the cities w/ the same name in different countries are treated as one city.

I am in Santa Fe, NM but ranked with people in Santa Fe, Argentina.

Same for me: http://github-awards.com/users/search?login=Azdle

Tells me I'm in Houston, actually in Minneapolis.

Same I'm in Rhode Island not Irvine

http://github-awards.com/users/search?login=mpiannucci

Same here. I'm from Italy, but reported from Madagascar :)

https://github.com/amadvance http://github-awards.com/users/search?login=amadvance

What are you using to parse and resolve location? There doesn't seem to be a suggested format for a github profile and myself, like many other people in the US just put in a State abbreviation or City name which has DC in Van, Turkey.

I'm using Google Geocoding API untill i reached the rate limit (2.5k calls / day) and Openstreetmap API for the rest

>The Geocoding API may only be used in conjunction with a Google map; geocoding results without displaying them on a map is prohibited. For complete details on allowed usage, consult the Maps API Terms of Service License Restrictions.

https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/

I wanted to use this API for a simple app of mine too but in the end didn't because of this. Used Mapquest instead, which seems good too.

I don't think it's updated in realtime, is it?

OK, got it. It's missing a significant amount of data because of GitHub-Archive.

https://github.com/igrigorik/githubarchive.org/issues/30

It won't recognize my city from my profile even after I added it (other developers for my city show up, though). Are the results cached? Is there any way to refresh the cache?

Great idea, and quite funny to use :)

Awesome !!

I'd like to call out for the author of this that you are in breach of the Github name and branding usage guidelines:

> ## Naming projects and products > Please avoid naming your projects anything that implies GitHub’s endorsement. This also applies to domain names.

(Reference: https://github.com/logos)

Edit: Why the downvotes? It's valid, and if someone had used my company name in their unauthorized, misleading and buggy "awards" platform, we'd be asking them to refrain from attaching themselves to our name and brand.

Absolutely right, my upvote FWIW.

I wish GitHub would crack down harder on sites that do this.

This site, and a lot of the other sites that use GitHub APIs and data are clearly trying to blur the boundary between whether they're part of GitHub or not, and it's incredibly annoying.

I don't pay for my GitHub account so that I can have some goofy ranking, or spend 10 minutes wondering, "Is this site really affiliated with GitHub?" If it keeps up, I'll probably migrate to BitBucket at some point.

> I don't pay for my GitHub account so that I can have some goofy ranking, or spend 10 minutes wondering, "Is this site really affiliated with GitHub?" If it keeps up, I'll probably migrate to BitBucket at some point.

What on earth are you talking about?

If you don't care care about your ranking, nobody is forcing you to care. (Yet, you might switch to a rival platform because...?)

It's pretty obvious really. The sites are a distraction I don't want, and they're a distraction I wouldn't have with BitBucket.

Yes, in this case it's just a stupid ranking, but in the past there have been more serious fakes, where GitHub has had to step in and tell people a site isn't related to them.

The site you are under no obligation to use and up until 17 minutes ago weren't aware of is a "distraction"?

Really now? https://github.com. Done.

No kidding.

If you're so concerned, then if it's not on github.com or not advertised via blog.github.com ... ignore it!

I mean, we're not talking about Phishing here. We're talking about a user who is annoyed that he stumbled upon a site and is unsure if he should like it or not. Almost sounds like an odd form of brand loyalty. "I can't decide if i should like this or not"

Really odd form of brand loyalty. "Things are diluting the brand I like, I'm going to switch to a competitor so I don't have to worry about liking things related to the brand I like"

How would you even know about the site, unless you had read about it on HN?

How would moving to BitBucket keep you from reading about it on HN?

If after you read about it on HN, you spent lots of time playing with it or reading and arguing in these comments, and you regret spending that time... how can you blame GitHub for that, and again how will moving to BitBucket help exactly?

Yep, it's pretty obvious, really. That you're very confused.

Well played sir or madam.

I'm actually building the equivalent BitBucket version of the site right now. Stay tuned!

Downvoted because "wah wah wah branding guidelines wah wah wah". I thought this was hacker news, not crybaby news.

Seriously, though--it's awards for rankings, based on github. I think that the "github-awards" domain name is rather descriptive. What, you'd prefer some other nonsense like "rank.ly" or some other damn fool thing?

EDIT:

The fact that the parent post is the top comment on this thread is saddening. Not "Hey, cool app", not "Hey, so how'd you build it?", not even "Hey, does Github know about this?"

Instead, a "calling out" because of some fineprint. Laaaame.

It's a legitimate concern, like having a spammy clickbait article.

The site infringes on Github's trademarks all over the place.

Can the site still get users' time and attention without stealing Github's branding?

When it's a tool that is explicitly built off of the Github platform, it doesn't seem unreasonable that they mention Github.

If Github cares, let them file a C&D or just talk with the author--it isn't our job to play trademark police. It's entirely too negative a behavior on our part.

>If Github cares, let them file a C&D or just talk with the author--it isn't our job to play trademark police. It's entirely too negative a behavior on our part. //

TMs are for consumers. It's entirely a consumers business to ensure that they are not being deceived as to the origin of goods and services they receive solicitations for. Yes GitHub should also be concerned but it's not their concern alone.

TMs benefit us in preventing financial incentive for scammers and frauds.

Expressing trademark concerns can be a positive thing, as here.

My initial view of the page had me assume that it came from the owners of Github™ as it used the name in the domain and used a [partial] GitHub [imitation] logo as a full viewport bg-image and mentions "on GitHub" in the most prominent page copy as if you're on GitHub.

I'd be surprised if there wasn't intent to use these elements to make the site appear to be "official".

If you assumed it came from Github, well, I can't help you.

I mean, there's a useful question there: if we are to support remixing and hacking and whatnot, do we also need to stop assuming that any work referencing a company is automatically endorsed or representing that company?

I'm honestly kind of surprised that anybody thought this came from Github--least of all, because they seem to just post things on their own domain. That being, you know, the point of having a domain.

It doesn't merely reference GitHub.

I followed a link from HN that said "Discover your ranking on GitHub" - on GitHub usually means on GitHub's site. Using GitHub in this way is using a trademark that is supposed to be reserved for indicating origin. On arriving at the site one sees the GitHub logo (or at least a facsimile portion) and references to GitHub usernames and use of the [non-distinctive] GitHub livery [many sites use that same scheme though]. Checking the domain name one sees use of GitHub's trademark again. This is better than most phishing sites I've seen - next step for me is usually to do a whois if I care to find if it's an official site.

Up to this point it's either a phishing site or from GitHub. Without further investigation then IMO it's normal to assume non-infringing trademark use.

Presumably you've never come across a company that uses different domain prefix/suffixes with a trademark like, oh I don't know, http://Googlemail.com ?

github-awards.com with copy saying "we use GitHub's API to gather info and present an unofficial award" then I can see that any infringement might be incidental. With "on GitHub", with the livery, the logo and the domain; it's passing off.

"see your ranking on Github" is similar to "see the number of friends you have on Facebook" or "look at your word usage on Hacker News". It's clearly being used to refer to the platform, not the site.

Besides, it has just a box for entering your username, which then scrapes data and presents it--hardly a phishing site.

Is any issue that you personally don't care about "crybaby news"?

Is the community better served by positive responses to creative works, or to nitpicking over trademark infringement by people who are not responsible for either claiming it or enforcing it?

How about both? A comment describing how the name of the product is a violation of GitHub's name and branding usage guidelines does not somehow cancel out other comments.

If everybody wrote the same comment, there would be no point to commenting.

Hi, Vincent here, author of Github Awards. Thanks for pointing this out.

There is already a small note in footer stating that this site is no way affiliated with the Github company, i'll make that a lot more visible.

>i'll make that a lot more visible. //

Appears below the fold in what looks like 9pt* for me; I take it the visibility hasn't been improved yet.

* checked, it's 10px vs 18px attribution line.

No i havent updated it yet.

FWIW

>I'm vincent author of GitHub Awards,

Which is the start of one of your other comments is also pretty deceptive. You are the "author of github-awards.com a site that is not affialiated with GitHub"; "author of GitHub Awards" gives entirely the opposite suggestion.

The name still breaks the naming section of GitHub's terms. It doesn't matter if you put a disclaimer on it.

Naming projects and products

Please avoid naming your projects anything that implies GitHub’s endorsement. This also applies to domain names.

Edit: Also the background breaks this:

Please don’t do these things

Create a modified version of the Octocat or GitHub logo

Maybe change domain to xxxxxx-awards.com :)

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