What is counted

A developer’s score is their public plus private contributions over the trailing twelve months. Private contributions are the count GitHub itself exposes — a number, never the underlying work. Ranking uses contributions first, followers second, and login alphabetically as the final tie-break, so equal scores never swap places between snapshots.

How developers are found

Candidates come from GH Archive, the public record of every public GitHub event. Streaming a rolling seven-day window finds everyone who did something visible, costs no API budget at all, and takes seconds rather than the hours a search-based sweep needs. Only the filtered survivors are then looked up through GitHub’s API.

The limit worth knowing: the archive only records public activity, so somebody working almost entirely in private repositories does not appear in it. A smaller search pass covers that gap. Accounts firing thousands of events at a single repository are dropped as automation before anything is looked up.

Where location comes from

GitHub has no structured country or city field — only a free-text line that people fill in however they like. Both country and city are parsed from that one string, and a city is kept only where at least eight tracked developers agree on a name. “Earth”, “remote” and “/dev/null” are discarded rather than guessed at. This is the single largest source of error on the site, and it affects every competitor equally.

Measured against estimated

Contribution totals and follower counts are measured. Where the day-by-day calendar has not yet been fetched, the heatmap shape is a deterministic estimate derived from the measured total — the same login always produces the same calendar, and the total always matches exactly. Every estimated chart is labelled as such. The scheduled crawler replaces estimates with the real calendar.

Organizations

The organization board ranks employers by the combined contributions of tracked developers who name them in their profile, not by follower count. It is drawn from a free-text company field, so it reflects what people write, including spelling variants.

Accounts we exclude, and why we show you anyway

7 accounts exceeded 300,000 contributions in twelve months — over 820 every day without a break. That is not a person; it is a bot committing under a personal account. They are excluded from every ranking. Most leaderboards either let these accounts sit at number one or drop them silently. Here they are, so you can judge the rule for yourself.

Where this snapshot came from

Bootstrap snapshot mapped from the public gayanvoice/top-github-users dataset. Replaced by this repository's own crawler on its first scheduled run.

Bootstrap data is mapped from gayanvoice/top-github-users, a public dataset, with thanks. This repository’s own crawler replaces it on its first scheduled run.

How these numbers are made