Backstory

Philadelphia Startup Weekend 2011

Githacking was the idea I pitched at Philadelphia Startup Weekend 2011; it subsequently went on to win the event. The gist of what we set out to build was a layer on top of Github that helped contributors and maintainers in the open source community find and manage projects. For contributors, we hoped to better connect them to projects of interest (which may or may not be the most forked or trending repositories). For maintainers, we hoped to help promote their work and arm them with tools to recruit contributors.

Our philosophy that weekend, three words, build cool shit. That's it, simple and to the point. We did not come to compete. We did not come to build a company. We came to have a good time and spend 54 hours doing what we love to do, hack. Icing on the cake was doing it with others who felt exactly the same way.

Team

• Chris Baglieri (@chrisbaglieri)
• Josiah Kiehl (@bluepojo)
• John Bunting (@codingjester)
• Aaron Feng (@aaronfeng)

Press

• Hacker News
• Read Write Web
• Philly.com
• Flying Kite Media
• Demo/Pitch Part 1
• Demo/Pitch Part 2
• 5by5 Podcast

Post Philadelphia Startup Weekend 2011

The interesting thing about Startup Weekend is that a lot of the ideas that emerge are difficult to build a business on, especially one that can support the entire team behind the idea. There are exceptions. We were not one of them. Realizing this we pivoted and began exploring developer profiles and building a recruitment engine on that foundation. We were well aware of the trend of startups and small companies using Github as a metric for measuring the caliber of developers. In this new direction, we hoped to piggyback on that practice.

Shortly thereafter, Stack Overflow launched Careers 2.0 and it deflated us. They had traction, an active and immense pool of users, a brand and trusted name, blah blah blah. We had an incomplete minimal viable product. We never did recover from their launch. The team disengaged. While we tried to re-ignite our efforts on a few occasions, the engine ran out of gas. We failed early and fast. We learned. We started working on the next idea.

Now What

I still believe connecting developers with repositories of interest can be improved. I still believe Career 2.0, while good, can be better. I also believe it's only a matter of time until Github jumps into this space. And truthfully, if that were to happen, I'd be the first in line.

There's no doubt this repository is a cake that needs a little bit more time in the oven. I'm also of the mindset closed ideas get nowhere. Githacking was always about the community and there's no better way to help the community than sharing something that potentially inspires other hackers to do the same.