
Show HN: Git-brag shows stargazers from important companies - minxomat
https://github.com/turbo/git-brag
======
minimaxir
> The code uses browser automation because creating a RegEx pattern for all
> weird-as-heck "company" names is hard.

That doesn't explain why web scraping is used instead of using the GitHub API,
which is more kosher.

With the API, query all Stargazers, then query the user profiles of those
users.

For unauthenticated requests, this will only work if n < 60, but for
authenticated requests, the sky is the limit.

I have an old GitHub repo that essentially implements this and I believe it
still works: [https://github.com/minimaxir/get-profile-data-of-repo-
starga...](https://github.com/minimaxir/get-profile-data-of-repo-stargazers)

It only needs a tweak to support the company field, and I might do just that
if there is enough demand.

~~~
minxomat
Well, I'd like to see what the banner for other projects look like without
auth-ing the API (and 60 requests seems a bit low for that). I really just
hacked this together on a train without further thought put into it. Sorry
again for that.

~~~
sidi
I believe it's 5000 reqs/hr with an access token.

------
broodbucket
This is cool but if this becomes widespread it would make me less likely to
star repositories. If people use this to brag "X company is (interested
in/potentially using) my code", then my starring of their repository turns it
from personal interest to corporate endorsement.

~~~
musically_ut
Hmm, I agree with you on that. This was my thinking behind appreciate [1],
that starring would be a personal token of appreciation rather than an
endorsement by the employer.

[1] [https://github.com/musically-ut/appreciate](https://github.com/musically-
ut/appreciate)

------
chriswarbo
Quite interesting; maybe "github-brag" would be better, as it's unfortunately
of little interest to us git users who avoid github.com :)

------
mwfunk
What is a "stargazer" in this context? I've never heard this term used in the
context of software development before.

~~~
jajern
The star button on Github is kind of similar to "liking" a repo. Stargazers,
I'm guessing, are the group of people that have clicked the star button on a
repo.

~~~
aaronsnoswell
I agree with your interpretation here, but at my workplace the phrase
'Stargazers' means someone who does greenfield research - something quite
different.

------
minxomat
Yeah, sorry for the language choice here. Again, just a 5min project. Cheers.

~~~
diggan
Would be nice to at least have some installation instructions and what
dependencies the project has. Right now it's just a list of usage commands.

~~~
minxomat
Right now it only works on Windows, but it could easily be ported to a more
portable language. The appveyor.yml has the powershell commands it takes to
install AutoIt and build the project.

------
louthy
This is great, installed, thanks!

Now to brag: [https://github.com/louthy/language-
ext/](https://github.com/louthy/language-ext/)

------
sidi
This is a great idea, kudos! You should consider extending it to *nix systems.

Also like someone here mentioned, it might be good to extend the Fortune 500
with a community contributed list of companies.

~~~
minxomat
Currently setting up badge service. The problems with an entirely community-
driven list is that for a large amount of companies, there has to be some
scoring mechanism for ones that are more important than others.

~~~
rovr138
That may be too subjective. I mean, if I'm in another country, maybe local
companies are more important?

~~~
minxomat
That's exactly the issue at hand.

------
tedmiston
This would be really cool as a repo badge. What do you think?

~~~
minxomat
I might (I'm pretty sure) rewrite this in a more portable way and add an SVG
renderer for a badge. Right now the list only contains the F500 companies and
some FOSS-centred ones. That may need extending.

~~~
keithwhor
Could you build this as a service on
[https://stdlib.com/search](https://stdlib.com/search) ? Would make it
portable for anybody without having to clone. (Disclaimer: Founder)

~~~
tedmiston
Just some feedback — it's kind of hard to understand what your product really
is. If the idea is "Heroku for microservices on top of AWS Lambda" I feel like
you might want to call that out somewhere to make it clearer.

~~~
keithwhor
Awesome. Thank you for the feedback! Always working on improving messaging. :)

------
benkaiser
Would have liked this to give me the usernames of those stargazers. Could
imagine it might be useful if you are looking for work and have a popular
github repo.

~~~
minxomat
I don't think bothering people who just starred (i.e. not even watched/follow)
your repo (correct me if I misunderstood your intention here) is a good way to
get a job. But that's just my 2ct.

You can always browse the stargazers by just clicking the starcount. You can
also slightly modify the code to not truncate the array.

~~~
benkaiser
Yeah you are right, it's not a strong bond by any means, but it at least helps
if you were going to email them an intro.

------
ljw1001
It would make a lovely web app.

------
minxomat
Unstable badge API added. Bug fixed.

------
jondubois
Nice. It should also give you a brag score.

