Joshua T Kalis articles

I Want To Do This

8 Oct 2013

I sometimes have good ideas, and some of those times I actually attempt to do something about them. This is not one of those times so I am going to write about it to hopefully inspire someone to do it for me and thank me endlessly for the idea.

Sometimes I Procrastinate

A while ago I found, or was shown, the GitHub Resume which I thought was absolutely awesome. Then fairly recently I was shown The Opensource Report Card which is potentially a smidgen more awesome. I looked through these things and thought to myself “what a great idea someone had and actually acted upon”. And in reading through their content I had the passing thought:

someone should combine the two and make a better version of both, and what other data(s) can be leveraged: LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, Twitter. I’m sure other people know more than me and those could get added in as well. Yeah, someone should do that, that would be awesome.

I apologize for the excessive use of the word awesome.

And I sat and looked at these two products and reveled in their collective ingenuity until a thought hit me “I could create that mashup of (sorry) awesomeness”. So I thought about it over the next few days and then I even forked one of the repositories at one point when I thought I was going to start my work. But then life happened with deadlines and what-have-you. Short story, long — I have yet to actually do anything about my wonderful(ly-stolen) idea to contribute to the internet’s awe-ispiring glory.

But today I realized that maybe there are people out there with too much time on their hands — I know there are people like that on the internet — who themseleves are brilliant but don’t have an idea to work on. And here I am sitting on a golden ticket of an idea. So maybe I could write about it — to get the word out a little bit more — so they could help out.

Here Are Some Ideas

GitHub has all of this data about people — developers mostly — and it is all easily accessible via their API. I think there are more interesting things that could be done with that data for a project like this. Like going a little deeper into connections with other people: who they are following, who is following them, stars on projects and who has starred (if that is even possible, forks, pull requests, issues, commits, branches, etc.). The point is, there are so many different ways of looking at the data that there are probably cool things waiting to be found.

LinkedIn was my first mashup candidate. I was thinking about their recommendations section — which isn’t easily publicly accessible via their API, (hint, hint, LinkedIn) — but could be again a treasure-trove of information if you dive into them beyond the surface. But there are some other cool things in LinkedIn beyond what could be a part of GitHub. On LinkedIn you can list projects you have worked on, like websites; there are probably lots of things that people are a part of that don’t lend themselves to be in a Git repository on GitHub.

Now ,I am not one much for social media sites like Google+ or Facebook, but I hear that some people like them. I’m sure there is some interesting information that people include on sites like these that could be incorporated. For instance, Twitter could be searched for conversations about topics and cross-referenced with projects in the GitHub list of repositories to indicate dedication to support or development with the community at large. StackOverflow could be searched for questions asked and answers provided.

Yeah, But What About Processing

What about it? These are simple on-demand utilities used for some information about someone — or maybe yourself. What? You don’t Google yourself from time to time? Right. Point is, they don’t have to be instant and not all information needs to be filled in or even returned at the same time. Portions of the results could come back at different times and change other portions based on new information.

Maybe there could be a way to download a data object (JSON) to be used to show an archived / out-of-date version of the results on a personal website. Hey archive.org has been keeping stuff backed up that is completely unneccessary for a long time.

Conclusion

Ideas abound and I have only spent a short time actually thinking about this and even less time writing this article. Maybe more people will contribute ideas in the comments and hopefully someone with more time than me will be able to pick this up and run with it.

I can promise no fame or fortune, only gratitude.

Tags

Idea