GitHub Geo User Search

Background

I travel a lot and I like networking with developers in the city I'm visiting to get a sense of the local tech scene. So many people are working on so many cool projects, it's an absolute blast learn about!

I thought I would try to scale my networking by growth hacking a process that streamlined the number of people I could connect with before I got to my destination.

So I decided to write a small script in NodeJS over a weekend and called it GitHub Geo User Search. My main concern doing this is what people's reactions will be. I will be documenting this test in a series of blog posts, the first of which can be found here.

Requirements

• Speed to development
• Small script
• Easy to search multiple cities
• Extract the largest sample size
• Avoid using a database, so store all data in .json files

GitHub API Call Limits

• GitHub limits the number of hourly calls to 30
  • Will need to limit calls to 1 every 2 seconds
• GitHub will limit your accessible search results to 1000 results
  • Needed to devise away around this limitation
  • Build an array of characters that can be used in a login name
  • Create a two character array of every combination of characters
  • Search GitHub by location and two characters from the array (eg. aa, ab, ac ... za, za, zc ... _a, _b, _c)
  • Execute a search every two seconds until the application has iterated over every possible character pair
  • Store the results of every API call in a .json file
  • Merge all search result .json files into one
• Request user info from all users found in search result
  • Save user info into a .json file
  • Merge all .json files into one
  • Convert .json file int a .csv file

Install GitHub Geo User Search

• Clone the repo
• npm install
• Create a Data Directory (yes, I was to lazy to automatically check and make a dir, lol)
• Open the downloadUsers.js file
  • Change the location variable value; insert the location you would like to search (line 10)
  • Change the client value; insert your GitHub Personal Token (line 11)
• node downloadUsers.js
• Depending on the search results this could take a while

Feel free to get in touch, send a pull request or post any issues.

bc.