> ## 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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...?)
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.
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?
I'm vincent author of GitHub Awards, if you have any questions feel free to ask
https://github.com/amadvance http://github-awards.com/users/search?login=amadvance
Tells me I'm in Houston, actually in Minneapolis.
I am in Santa Fe, NM but ranked with people in Santa Fe, Argentina.
On the other hand, maybe that's Github's future business model: Rank Open Source slaves and sell that information to recruiters.
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.
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?)
GitHub Archive data are not perfect, and there are also room for improvements in the import process.
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.
I asssume stars only apply for personal projects? Spin it off, lose your ranking. :)
"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.
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!
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.
I was not aware of this. Thanks for the tip!
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.
Also, it seems that some of my repo are not taking into account, like https://github.com/picsoung/uberSlackBot which has 13 stars.
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)
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 :)
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.
For those of you who aren't aware, Rich is the inventor and maintainer of the language.
Perhaps a better label than 'top developer' would be 'developer of most popular repos' or something.
Edit: Also, I have more than 1 star on my projects, yet it just reports 1?
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.
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.
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)
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).
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 would be nice to be able to see results by specifying a geographic radius.
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.
People with only a country as their location, e.g. “Norway” are detected as being in “Norway, United States”. :-)
For example, it seems that for Kraków (Poland) you have both Kraków and Cracow.
PS : Great project!
