Recruitment Searching on GitHub

We’re currently looking for Senior Mobile (iOS / Android) and Senior Fullstack Engineers at OfficeLuv. Finding great developers is…difficult. I will occasionally search for individuals on GitHub, where I can find a scrap of contact information and reach out.

GitHub doesn’t exactly provide a fantastic interface for perusing influential users, but it does have a reasonably advanced search. From there, you can select people using a certain language, in a certain location, and with a certain number of followers. I use the followers as [an admittedly flawed] proxy for proficiency. You could alternatively substitute number of public repositories as a proxy for proficiency.

As an example, here’s my search for influential JavaScript developers in Chicagoland. If you take a look at the search terms, you can see where to tweak/replace the chosen language, alter the lower-bound of followers, or change the location. Use it to find some good employees.

Update

I was finding good candidates with these searches, but often people obfuscate their email addresses out of their public GitHub profile page. But never forget the metadata found in git itself! Every committed code change pushed to GitHub (or any git repository) must have an email address attached to it. So, all you have to do is find the raw commit data.

Fortunately, GitHub has an API that displays [a portion of] raw git data for public code repositories. To view commit metadata for a given repository, you can visit this URL, substituting your own values:

https://api.github.com/repos/<username>/<repo_name>/commits

Then, just look for the commit > author > email field.