A few things that immediately jumped at me:

- Not all code is on GitHub and not all of it is public. Recently I see more and more code moving elsewhere: GitLab (both managed and self-hosted), Codeberg, Forgejo instances.

- Even the code that is on GH might live outside of personal profile. Many notable FLOSS projects have their own organisations on GH. People who produce a lot of that code have direct commit access and don’t keep forks on their profiles. You’re missing all of the most prolific developers here.

- Location field in a GH profile is full of jokes. Search for “space”, “internet”, “/dev/null”, etc.

- It picks top repos weirdly. I tried to find my profile. It picked one repo that is not in my profile and wasn’t there probably for a long time, and another that is a public archive and hasn’t been updated since 2017. Both are forks with minimal contributions on my part. I have pinned repos in my profile that are much fresher and, arguably, more relevant.

But the project looks sleek. Probably helpful in addition to Linkedin and whatever to uncover more potential candidates. I’m glad it works for you.

Developers known for their zig work like mitchellh, matklad, and Jarred-Sumner weren't in the results at all.

As soon as that is added, people will start to try to optimise their profiles to place them high in the list on certain things, rendering the tool pretty much useless.

The talent people want to find in the talent that doesn’t do everything in its power to say “hey, look at me, I’m talent”, but just… well… does things.

I love the concept, but it seems to struggle with judging what code/text relevant and important

Frankly, I don't have much time to contribute to open source these days. I send a PR maybe once a year.

Almost everything on my profile is from my university days, and none of it is related to my career specialty (ML SRE).

And my employer asks me to fill out a form before I publish personal projects, so that they can be sure it is unrelated to my job (and thus that they do not have a patent or copyright claim over the code). This means most of my weekend projects simply aren't public, because I can't be bothered to do the paperwork.

LinkedIn, on the other hand, clearly shows where I've worked and what I've worked on. It's a much more accurate resume for me that GitHub.

I think this tool as a whole is probably an awful way to judge a candidate. But that's not really the point. The point is to find additional candidates with a low false negative rate.

E.g. over the past year I've written tens of thousands of lines of zig code. But that's not on my resume nor my LinkedIn. this would allow someone to include me. Is the code good, or am I a good candidate? Impossible to tell... Ah, but now you have heard of me! :D

There's more fluff on the page, but it's just fluff, and safe to ignore.

> And my employer asks me to fill out a form before I publish personal projects, so that they can be sure it is unrelated to my job (and thus that they do not have a patent or copyright claim over the code). This means most of my weekend projects simply aren't public, because I can't be bothered to do the paperwork.

Your employer is bad and they should feel bad! If you have the option you should consider changing to an employer less willing to make the world worse... or maybe a jurisdiction where that toxicity is unenforceable.

For the record, my employer is Google.

They call this process the Invention Assignment Review Committee or IARC.

From what I understand, the process is not actually enforceable anyway. Code I write related to my job is owned by them; other code I write is owned by me. I don't necessarily have to go through their process for this to be true. And their lawyers certainly know this.

I've done it once, and the process is lightweight. And I probably could ignore it in practice with no one actually caring. But the fact that the process even exists is enough of a blocker that I don't readily publish my hobby projects anymore, and that's kinda shitty.

and they know this, and that's the point... there's a reason people talk about the chilling effects of shitty, but not technically illegal behavior

> For the record, my employer is Google.

Yeah, I knew that from your hn profile. Which caused me to ask a friend, also SRE at google, how onerous it was, he said basically the exact same thing you did, just intrusive enough his github is also completely empty.

I wonder what cool stuff doesn't exist today because of it

why not?

i have included every significant contribution to any project, whether it is paid or not on my CV. why would i leave that out? it's experience. only code that i write for my own use and don't publish may not be worth to be listed

The issue isn't that not everyone has a Github presence, the issue is that for most people their Github presence is somewhat unrepresentative of their actual job skills.

GitMatcher is primarily aimed at the sourcing stage, where recruiters can find devs based on their actual code contributions. But I agree, it's not a one-size-fits-all solution — it's not meant to replace LinkedIn or fully capture your career.

When I search for TypeScript with location Fort Worth there is only one result. When I change the location to Dallas there are 10 results. Search cannot resolve results for Dallas/Fort Worth with any combination of white space.

As a bonus candidate search tools never include a "negative search", as in results to exclude. For example: TypeScript, but not React.

An employer looking for a candidate has no reason to exclude someone with React experience though. If they want a candidate with Express.js experience, candidates may still have both. They just need the positive search in that case.

I completely disagree and you are focusing on a made up rhetorical example far too much. There is always benefit to more efficiently excluding results you don't want.

if you have a realistic use case please describe it.

Why? You are clearly missing the point and lack imagination. Another example won't satisfy you the way you think it will.

Basically all of the major tech companies have boilerplate hoops you need to jump through to make open source contributions on the side, let alone open source anything major internally.

This difference here is wonderful.dev adds points to skills based on repo stars. We take a dev's contributions to a repo, times that repo's stars, then assign those points to the repo's languages on the dev's profile. It's a proxy for impact by language.

I love the concept though. Banning people from writing their own profiles makes it feel more objective/accurate even when it's not.

I guess this is just one more thing I feel is a barrier to equitable evaluation and hiring practices.

Keep it up and iterate! This is a good direction, and it certainly is going to be useful for some teams :)

  $ curl -D - 'https://gitmatcher.com/assets/index-CKQ82hdV.css'
  HTTP/2 301 
  date: Tue, 08 Apr 2025 15:58:51 GMT
  location: https://gitmatcher.com/assets/index-CKQ82hdV.css
  ...

I also have a self-updating github readme, it commits everyday

I know the LinkedIn API is limited but it would also be cool to see a social graph of contributors you have worked with somehow. Finding the people, their titles, and companies would be valuable to see where you level (just imho).

This is a good idea, but it needs more work on how to tokenize and index the profiles. Are you just using the API? or storing the profiles? because API for exact matches misses a lot of profiles. The location field in GitHub has been always been inconsistent, some people use country flag emojis instead of names, or just abbreviations like AR, BO, or USA, etc

It can also be gamed by just filling your repo with all sorts of stuff pulled from elsewhere.

It’s not meant to be the only tool in the hiring process, but rather to help make the first step more data-driven.

I appreciate your thoughts — it helps make GitMatcher better.

Why would Github commits more significant when discovering people than LinkedIn CVS?

HN is doing a good job of complaining about all the edge cases where this won't work because most of us don't contribute high-quality, novel work to GH. For example, for me, my recent GH contributions are for an ancient video game in a niche language I've never used elsewhere and my location isn't even exposed. So I won't show up. Boo hoo.

It's still a neat idea.

Also, while Github is big indeed, most public repositories are either concerned with open source software, are of low quality, are just cloning other software.

Most developers don't have their work in public git repositories.

I cannot put it in github even if I wanted to since I was handsomely paid for it, so your tool can never find me.

This is true for some of the best devs for hire, in any case, the best way to find good candidate leads are networking and referrals.

I'm very skeptical of the claim that you'll be able to identify people by "usefulness of code", whatever that means.

C# / Cape Cod: Nothing

Pogon / Cape Cod: Nothing

Although almost everyone has a price or list of things they would change about their current job.

you also might want to check all the links in your footer. all the social links are broken and the blog links to some generic content.