from Hacker News

Show HN: Discover your ranking on GitHub

by picsoung on 2/26/15, 3:00 PM with 106 comments

  • by lucisferre on 2/26/15, 4:29 PM

    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.

  • by codebeaker on 2/26/15, 3:20 PM

    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?)

  • by sfk on 2/26/15, 3:09 PM

    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.

  • by LukeB_UK on 2/26/15, 6:06 PM

    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?

  • by luu on 2/26/15, 3:31 PM

    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.

  • by m0th87 on 2/26/15, 3:35 PM

    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.

  • by jrochkind1 on 2/26/15, 3:37 PM

    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?

  • by danso on 2/26/15, 3:58 PM

    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)

  • by tessierashpool on 2/26/15, 7:40 PM

    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.

  • by ehamberg on 2/26/15, 4:28 PM

    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”. :-)

  • by jdjb on 2/26/15, 3:36 PM

    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?

  • by matthuggins on 2/26/15, 3:58 PM

    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.

  • by picsoung on 2/26/15, 3:06 PM

    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.

  • by lettergram on 2/26/15, 3:43 PM

    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.

  • by fcambus on 2/26/15, 3:30 PM

    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!

  • by cheshire137 on 2/26/15, 4:40 PM

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

  • by swah on 2/26/15, 3:43 PM

  • by fiatjaf on 2/26/15, 5:58 PM

    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?

  • by csl on 2/26/15, 4:15 PM

    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.

  • by vkjv on 2/26/15, 5:01 PM

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

  • by kristopolous on 2/26/15, 8:07 PM

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

  • by vdaubry on 2/26/15, 3:03 PM

    Hi,

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

  • by cblavier on 2/26/15, 3:03 PM

    Great idea, and quite funny to use :)

  • by muddy on 2/26/15, 3:10 PM

    Awesome !!

  • by codebeaker on 2/26/15, 3:33 PM

    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.