
Show HN: Discover your ranking on GitHub - picsoung
http://github-awards.com/
======
lucisferre
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.

~~~
welder
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](https://wakatime.com/leaders)

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

~~~
welder
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_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/WakaTime/comments/2uqgww/mockup_new_profile_page/)

------
codebeaker
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?)

~~~
vdaubry
What is your GitHub username ?

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

~~~
NathanKP
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.

------
sfk
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.

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

~~~
functional_test
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.

~~~
thebouv
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.

------
LukeB_UK
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?

~~~
flurdy
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.

~~~
juliengrimal
Maybe you should move out of your city ? ;)

------
luu
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.

~~~
jrochkind1
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.

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

------
m0th87
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.

~~~
danabramov
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.

~~~
r3bl
> "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!

------
jrochkind1
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?

~~~
mholt
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 :("

~~~
jmhobbs
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](https://github.com/vdaubry/github-
awards)

~~~
jrochkind1
Darnit, I'd be #4 in my city if only it recognized me!

------
danso
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)

~~~
knowtheory
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).

------
tessierashpool
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.

~~~
count
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!

~~~
tessierashpool
congratulations! achievement unlocked.

------
ehamberg
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”. :-)

------
jdjb
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?

~~~
robertk
It's for tiebreakers.

------
matthuggins
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.

------
picsoung
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](https://github.com/picsoung/uberSlackBot)
which has 13 stars.

~~~
catwell
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).

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

------
lettergram
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.

------
fcambus
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!

------
cheshire137
Why does it think Kentucky is in Australia? My profile:
[https://github.com/moneypenny](https://github.com/moneypenny)

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

------
swah
[http://github-awards.com/users?language=c&type=world](http://github-
awards.com/users?language=c&type=world)

------
fiatjaf
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?

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

------
csl
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.

~~~
r3bl
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.

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

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

------
vdaubry
Hi,

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

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

[http://github-awards.com/users/search?login=kylecronin](http://github-
awards.com/users/search?login=kylecronin)

[https://github.com/kylecronin](https://github.com/kylecronin)

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

[https://github.com/amadvance](https://github.com/amadvance) [http://github-
awards.com/users/search?login=amadvance](http://github-
awards.com/users/search?login=amadvance)

------
cblavier
Great idea, and quite funny to use :)

------
muddy
Awesome !!

------
codebeaker
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](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.

~~~
vdaubry
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.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
> _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.

~~~
vdaubry
No i havent updated it yet.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
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.

