GitHub Cue: Recommendations for GitHub Repos

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0530

If you aren’t already aware of it, I’m one of those people who goes around saying, “GitHub is my Facebook”. I spend quite a lot of time on GitHub, browsing the work of various people, looking at loads of interesting stuff that people built. I keep jumping between people pages and projects using the Watchers/Watching & Followers/Following pages. This way, I do come across interesting people and projects, but the SNR is too low. I wanted a better way to be able to see stuff, that I find interesting. That’s how the idea for this Chromium app – GitHub Cue – was born.

@baali and I hacked on this, during the last few days and got it working. It works as follows, (from the README) —

Scrapes all the descriptions of the repositories being watched by the user.
Key terms are extracted from this description text using the Yahoo Term Extractor.
A list of languages is obtained, based on the languages of the repositories, the user if watching.
GitHub searches are performed for a combination of 3 randomly chosen languages and 5 random key terms.
10 random repositories out of all these, are shown.

This is a very simplistic algorithm, but works decently for my purposes. Ideally, I would’ve liked to use a Collaborative Filtering algorithm, but I found the data to be too sparse, and the amount of computation to be too much to be done on the fly. I wasn’t really interested in pre-computing stuff and putting it onto my server. I settled down to the next best thing I could think of.

I would appreciate any further ideas and suggestions. Thanks!

App on Noetic Nought

GitHub Cue: Recommendations for GitHub Repos