David R. MacIver's Blog

Randomly exploring github

I made a thing!

If you go to githubexplorer.com you will get a little toy for visiting random Github repos.

It doesn’t just select them at random. It picks a user, then picks a random repo they like. As a result, popular and interesting repos should occur more often than uninteresting ones.

Right now it’s very basic. I have some additional plans for using it to test bed some ideas I have for UIs for randomly exploring things.

(Also right now it’s a little crashy. Having a problem with the way it’s deployed which I’ve yet to get to the bottom of. Just refresh the page and it should be fine)

Comments

Rupert on 2012-07-16 10:45:34:

Neat - are the users own repos included in their ’like’s, though? I have a few instances of users recommending me their own project. I guess that’s because you automatically watch your own projects.

david on 2012-07-16 10:50:07:

Yeah, that’s a deliberate feature. It randomly chooses a project you watch and, as you say, you watch your own projects.

I think this is a good thing personally - it allows discovery of rare projects. Part of why I implemented this is the difficulty of finding interesting but obscure things.