As far as I can tell, this equates 'best programmers' with people who run repositories for popular projects.
I suppose if you think Justin Bieber and various top of the charts pop stars are the best musicians it makes sense.
I think that good programmers can be involved in popular projects but being involved in a popular project on github shouldn't be the defining characteristic of a 'good programmer'.
It's a threshold filter. If you can create and maintain a project that's actually useful to people, you are definitely not a bozo. (NB: if you haven't done so, it doesn't mean you're a bozo; the implication only goes one way).
It's a better filter than "attended a super-elite university".
All I know is that if I put in Austin, Tx, I see a few people that I know in the top 10 to be really good software developers.
However, these are the types of people who generally start their own projects, and attract other good developers to a project. Their salaries are also going to be quite a bit higher than the average developer as well.
So, it seems to me that project popularity is at least some indicator that a person is competent as a software developer, but I can think of a lot of jobs that wouldn't require someone to be in the top 10.
I think that it would be great to be able to be able to search by code quality, test coverage, etc., but I don't think that we have the AI metrics to do that yet, and unfortunately, a real human has to look at someone's code to decide if it's any good.
However, this reminds me of software that tries to detect what "reading level" a person is writing at. For example, google lets you search by "reading level". It would be an interesting project for someone to apply the same principles to software.
Its 2011, githire.com should work the same as www.githire.com. This is my biggest pet peeve with any site.
Agreed. At the very least, either CNAME one to the other. If you really want/need one canonical domain, it's not hard to define a 301 redirect to the appropriate domain.
Also, page 2 and on show people for different locations (eg. I searched for "Melbourne, Australia" and got some people from there, but the next page is Tokyo, and the next one is... Oregon? Refresh the page... get Texas. Location coordinates haven't changed though.
Don't pitch the value of your product with "We have a very high tech algorithm" until it works. Invoking the "secret sauce" when your basic functionality doesn't work is amateur-hour stuff, and degrades the benefit of the doubt that people otherwise give a new product.
This project feels like it's about halfway to MVP. This is more akin to a tech demo.
All that said, equating inbound connections with programmer ability is an inherently flawed metric for measuring how hireable a person is.
I'm mildly confused. What repository is listed alongside a user? My user (http://www.githire.com/user/Shadowfiend ) shows a repository that, to my knowledge, I've never created, forked, or contributed to...
Failed Execution. Take it down and fix it up. Do at least some testing before launching.
The biggest failure is that wrong information is showing up for peoples username. Thing is, if the username does not yet exist in your data set, then query it before showing someone else's profile.
Popularity does not show how good software developer is, we are not celebrities, some of us are not even bloggers. Some of us do not actively participate on open source, even if we have few repositories in Github. Though we still might be looking for work.
I actually love this based on easy of finding cool programmers in my area using languages I can play with. Yea, this sounds silly if you're in SF, but in Columbus, Ohio, finding cool programmers that dig FoSS and interpreted languages is tricky. Too many people doing Java, .NET and Oracle stuff at Nationwide and similar. Too few people doing fun things.
Looks like Columbus already has a Python and a Ruby usergroup. What more could you ask for?
Here in Memphis we had neither until last night, and cool people came out of the woodwork to see MemphisPython's first meeting. They weren't even all Python fans, really. I'm hoping it'll be a flashpoint for us.
If it is, it becomes an SEO game, which defeats the purpose of such a ranking system. I'd rather hire someone who is passionate about something, designs well, and writes good code. Their page ranking doesn't help me with that.
All I really see here is a "who's who" of the popular kids.
Hey, there's MVP, and then there's buggy as hell. Yours falls into the latter. I've loaded 'my' user profile now a half dozen refreshes, and I only saw myself once.
It'd be great if you went back and had a good look at your code, and how you got here. Less rush == better product == higher chance of traction.
Aside from the constructive criticism, it might help usability is you made your algorithm more transparent so users could see why they are essentially irrelevant (if they expected otherwise) and why some others are getting what appears to be arbitrarily high rankings. But, I do like this idea, and it would certainly benefit me if you found a way to make it universally indicative of a coder's skill. But that's hard. 1. It's still hard to tell without sitting a hacker down and testing them, 2. popularity does affect page rank. Some highly useful repositories are lost in a sea of absolutely useless, but popular programming playthings.
The idea is great, but the implementation is totally broken presently. I tried two times with "Montreal, QC" as a query, the first time it returned only result from London (UK) and the second time only Philadelphia (PA).
So lets pretend project popularity is a good measure for programmers. But what if somebody is contributing to other popular projects or is part of an organization that has popular projects?
NB: It seems you have your DNS/subdomains set up incorrectly. githire.com returns nothing while www.githire.com works. Be sure to set one of them to the canonical url for seo purposes.
Careful not to put an ec2 host IP address directly in your DNS provider. Given the caching in DNS, if/when you change EC2 instances you'll be given a new IP, and your site will be down (or looking at the old server) while DNS updates.
Better to use amazon's Elastic IP. Simply 1) create one, 2) assign it to the EC2 instance of your choice, 3) add the Elastic IP as your A record as the parent post suggests.
I'm sure you're working to fix a couple of issues with your app, so I'm not trying to pile on here. Love the idea, and I just wanted to report two bugs:
1. githire.com/user/acompa returns my account, while www.githire.com/user/acompa returns someone else.
2. Clicking "Add Info" on my profile
githire.com/user/acompa
takes me to the profile of user "edit" via
githire.com/user/edit
You might need to construct your URLs more consistently, it seems?
This thing is a joke. Searched for Atlanta Georgia and came across someone who had no open source contributions on and three skeleton projects as a top guy while high profile open source contributors were not in the system.
Can't even find my username (ahmetalpbalkan). I think it requires more testing on the ranking algorithm and probably more input parameters to compute rank.
There are some problems with the search engine, if i search by "Bogota" there is no result from my city... and it give me exactly the same results if i write "Colombia".
I suppose if you think Justin Bieber and various top of the charts pop stars are the best musicians it makes sense.
I think that good programmers can be involved in popular projects but being involved in a popular project on github shouldn't be the defining characteristic of a 'good programmer'.