Show HN: Git-brag shows stargazers from important companies

by minxomat • 10 years ago

94 31 10 years ago

minxomat8• 10 years ago

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

diggan• 10 years ago

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.

minxomat8• 10 years ago

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.

minimaxir• 10 years ago

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...

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

minxomat8• 10 years ago

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.

sidi2• 10 years ago

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

andrewmcwatters• 10 years ago

Kind of unfortunate, but it works. There's always room for improvement. Good eye, that's a fairly big implementation detail.

tedmiston2• 10 years ago

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

minxomat8• 10 years ago

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.

keithwhor2• 10 years ago

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

sidi2• 10 years ago

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.

minxomat8• 10 years ago

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• 10 years ago

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

mwfunk• 10 years ago

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

jajern• 10 years ago

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• 10 years ago

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

eknkc• 10 years ago

I believe GitHub officially used that term to those who starred a repo. Their API uses the term anyway: https://developer.github.com/v3/activity/starring/#list-star...

lgas• 10 years ago

It's the terminology github users in their API for people who have starred a project:

    GET /repos/:owner/:repo/stargazers

ljw1001• 10 years ago

It would make a lovely web app.

minxomat8• 10 years ago

Unstable badge API added. Bug fixed.

jondubois• 10 years ago

Nice. It should also give you a brag score.

chriswarbo• 10 years ago

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

benkaiser2• 10 years ago

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.

minxomat8• 10 years ago

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.

benkaiser2• 10 years ago

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.

louthy• 10 years ago

This is great, installed, thanks!

Now to brag: https://github.com/louthy/language-ext/

broodbucket• 10 years ago

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• 10 years ago

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

Show HN: Git-brag shows stargazers from important companies

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