Show HN: I built a tool to find devs based on code, not LinkedIn titles
73 comments
·April 8, 2025pointlessone
GitHub profile is not a CV.
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.
mtlynch
This is an interesting idea, but it didn't work for me. I tried "Zig developer" and it showed results that hadn't done much Zig work recently.
Developers known for their zig work like mitchellh, matklad, and Jarred-Sumner weren't in the results at all.
NabilChiheb
Thanks for your feedback will take a look? are you looking for zig developer? or you were just testing?
mtlynch
Just testing.
jstrieb
Small feedback: I would like to be able to enter my own profile to see how I will appear on the site. It would also be nice to know what searches my profile would be most likely to pop up for.
jstrieb
Okay I was able to find myself, but only by searching for the exact text in my GitHub bio. Nothing related to any of my repos surfaced my profile.
i-use-nixos-btw
Honestly, I’m against this.
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.
dagw
I'm finding profiles where the only reference to the thing I was searching for (PyTorch in this case) is in their profile text. None of their repos or commit history seem to use pytorch. I also refuse to believe that there is only one developer using pytorch in all of Stockholm.
I love the concept, but it seems to struggle with judging what code/text relevant and important
cbarrick
My public repos on GitHub are not a good way to judge me as a candidate. Not even close.
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.
DeathArrow
Same here. I don't care to publish my personal projects on Github and my work projects aren't there for obvious reasons.
grayhatter
I think a tool like this would be targeted more towards eliminating false positives, rather than eliminating false negatives.
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.
cbarrick
> Your employer is bad and they should feel bad!
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.
grayhatter
> 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
em-bee
over the past year I've written tens of thousands of lines of zig code. But that's not on my resume
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
grayhatter
Because it's across a few projects and none of them are popular enough to be worth listing.
slumbering
Yes, I'm in the same situation. The majority of my work is on private repositories, even though I've contributed to public repositories for many years. This tool wouldn't accurately reflect my current skills.
austin-cheney
Then clearly you would be ranked very low by something like this. I think that is the whole point of this: tell the people who have solid commit history from those who don't.
bpshaver
But the ranking is not reflective of actual skills. That's the critique. Aside from very frequent open source contributors (and I think these people are the minority of devs), devs will tend to be "profiled" by this tool according to the dot scripts, university projects, Advent of Code, or other half-hearted projects they happen to have put on their Github. (Maybe I'm just projecting...)
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.
austin-cheney
It is one dimension of many showing amounts of practice. I understand why that makes people sad, but that sadness just feels narcissistic.
DeathArrow
I might be interested on people who can help me solve my particular problem. Those people might not be the same who have lots of commits on Github.
austin-cheney
Then, logically, you would not hire them solely based on this one tool.
NabilChiheb
I completely understand your situation. GitHub isn't the perfect fit for everyone, especially for those in specialized roles like ML SRE
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.
ska
I think the problem runs deeper than that. What you’ve done is an interesting tool for finding out more about a relatively small slice of developers.
austin-cheney
When I search the results are not quite what I would expect. I have just under 10,000 commits in TypeScript language and my location is listed as Dallas/Fort Worth.
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.
jasonjmcghee
I have to ask- you're not interested in candidates if they have experience in certain frameworks?
austin-cheney
It was just an example, but yes, I would like to disqualify results that I don't want. It is just a general feature I wish were widely available in many places. If I were looking for jobs, for example, I would not want to waste time on that which is not relevant or outside my level.
pcthrowaway
If you were looking for jobs and had Typescript experience but not React experience, then sure, you might want to exclude jobs that require React experience.
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.
kortilla
The obvious problem here is the vast majority of software professionals in the US are not working on open source projects. So this tool is probably only useful if you’re looking for an open source dev or someone junior trying to break into the industry.
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.
cess11
It surfaces accounts because they've forked repos and done nothing or pushed demo applications from tutorials.
welder
Similar to what I'm doing with https://wonderful.dev (example dev profile: https://wonderful.dev/alan) where profiles can't be edited, devs can only connect their GitHub, StackOverflow, etc. and we fill in the profile for them with real data. No more fake Linkedin skills.
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.
jjmarr
It's already flagged me as a tech influencer because I mostly make PRs to existing projects, which doesn't seem to be pulled into the AI summary.
I love the concept though. Banning people from writing their own profiles makes it feel more objective/accurate even when it's not.
giantg2
One problem with this is my day job work (99.9% of my experience) isn't publicly posted and wouldn't be captured in the profile. The nature of my personal projects are significantly different than my job and result in different technologies being used to better fit the use case. Also, most of my personal projects are private and would be left out.
I guess this is just one more thing I feel is a barrier to equitable evaluation and hiring practices.
jppope
I love this! I'm reading through the criticism in the comments and I can't help but imagine all of the articles out there complaining about how the interview process is broken - sure enough even one tool that is slightly different than the standard interview process and what do people do? complain about its short comings.
Keep it up and iterate! This is a good direction, and it certainly is going to be useful for some teams :)
em-bee
the problem with the interview process is that it is unfair, not properly capturing the actual qualifications and testing the wrong stuff. the complaints here are that this tool does not properly capture the actual qualifications either, and therefore it suffers from the same problem, just in a different way. it may work for a few people, just like the interview process works for a few people, and it may work for a few use cases (like finding a FOSS developer) but it doesn't provide a solution for the interview problem itself.
nine_k
@NabilChiheb: Please note that your CSS URL is currently an infinite redirection loop:
$ 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
...ge96
What if they just fork a lot of stuff/not change it
I also have a self-updating github readme, it commits everyday
Hey HN
After years working in software engineering and helping with hiring, I noticed a frustrating pattern:
Companies often rely on résumés and LinkedIn titles to find developers instead of looking at what they've actually built.
So I built GitMatcher.
It analyzes GitHub profiles to surface developers based on:
Their public repos
Commit history
Originality and usefulness of code
Patterns that show consistency and real skill
No keywords. No job titles. Just code.
GitMatcher is useful if you're:
- A recruiter tired of resume roulette
- A founder looking for a technical co-founder
- An OSS maintainer searching for genuine contributors
It’s still early, so I’d love your feedback especially around what signals you’d care about most when discovering devs.