Hundreds of millions of stars turned into a map of GitHub projects

[mftb]

To me this is proof that doing a good visualization is really an art. I saw this on hn for a couple hours, but really didn't think much of it. As soon as I clicked through the funny names, and "continents" brought a smile to my face.

I guess my little project is too small to make it, but now I too aspire to join the great nation of Golandia.

[anvaka]

Thank you!

[binarysneaker]

"Homelabia" made me smile like a schoolboy.

[coffeeshopgoth]

I love these things - to see everything sort of classified, and all at once, helps me find things I would never think to look for. Forgive me if this has been posted somewhere else, but if you want to see a reddit map, here it is (maybe you found it already in their github, but I just have it as a bookmark): https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-reddit/?x=18083.096950551575...

[terrycody]

Yeah I just wanna paste this and found your answer :P, now we have another similar tool about Github, much more useful for many people, kudos to the author!

[geokon]

This gives a really cool top level view into the whole Chinese opensource community - which has always been very mysterious to me. Bc it's absolutely massive and almost entirely on its own doing its own thing due to the language barrier

[anvaka]

Indeed! A lot of amazing things happens there. A few are getting world wide adoption (echarts are awesome if you are into frontend viz, so is element-plus library for vue components). There are giant communities of ML too

[divan]

Check out other anvaka's projects, there are gems: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=anvaka.github.io

[tomthe]

Or check them out directly on the map: https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-github/#12.36/-31.74456/14.8...

[edrxty]

This is amazing, the GitHub ham radio and hardware scenes are way bigger than I previously thought. Shout-out to OpenRTX and M17 along with all the awesome SDR applications!

[topspin]

Is Vue over represented in this? Seems like there would be a Reactistan island somewhere before Vue would show up.

[tomschlick]

Vue is a pretty big deal in the PHP/Laravel community. Evan the creator even gave a talk at Laracon a few months in, showing the hockey stick growth after it started to get traction in the community.

[silverwind]

My feeling is that the React community is at least double to triple the size of the Vue one, so yes, I feel React should definitely be it's own island.

[jxf]

I'm embarrassed to admit that I read "stars" in the title and spent far too long trying to figure out how these were arranged into constellations.

[samsquire]

This is absolutely awesome. Such a good job well done! The search is fast! The sidebar is a great feature. I also love how you highlight the repositories you search for and draw red lines between things.

I found my journal repositories in the "Land of Node" in "Frontartia". I am surprised by that because I didn't realise I was associated with the node community!

I am so impressed with your visualization, it is intuitive and interesting the different communities of GitHub.

[anvaka]

Thank you so much!

I'm puzzled by some countries in Frontartia's island too. I'm not sure why it was even pulled away, as if there is something I'm missing.

[OmarShehata]

This is amazing! I love this effect of showing me that my little project that I was working on fairly solitarily is actually part of a community of other people doing similar work that I can reach out to/collaborate with etc!

What does it mean if, I click on a repo, and it shows 5-6 links to specific projects? Does that just mean the jaccard similarity index was below a threshold?

[anvaka]

Yes! I picked only the highest scores to form an edge in relationships graph. Typically a sigma (std deviation) or two away from the mean. So if there is a direct link between your project and others - the similarities are abnormally high.

Note that I'm not rendering direct links outside of the country yet, there might be more there. Will probably add a "focused" view to see those better

[mellosouls]

This is great, not just nice to look at but useful too. Top work!

How it was constructed (also really interesting) is described at the repo:

https://github.com/anvaka/map-of-github#readme

[anvaka]

thank you!

[VitoVan]

I'm quite unhappy with SBCL located in Schemaria:

https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-github/#12/13.469/-8.175

It should be Lispaña.

[defanor]

ML-family languages are placed in Schemaria as well; apparently it is a catch-all for functional languages.

[anvaka]

Should I rename Schemaria to Lispania?

[PedroBatista]

AILandia was big before but now has been growing at an astounding rate almost surpassing Frontera.

Some say it's a cancer others say it's inevitable and here to stay. Probably both are right.

Also, why is Swiftoria so big?

[anvaka]

I've been watching changelog nightly emails for a while - they summarize most starred daily repositories, and growth of AI there (subjectively) seems to be even higher than frontend tech

[specproc]

This is a beautiful project. It's useful, aesthetically pleasing, and based on a clever methodology. Absolutely love it. Great work.

[anvaka]

Thank you so much for your compliment!

[data_ders]

1. this is so cool. i'd love to see more name for the regions! 2. nit: one repo dear to my heart dbt-labs/dbt-core was previously dbt-labs/dbt as well as fishtownanalytics/dbt. they show up as unique nodes on your map. what most interesting to me is that each name of this repo links to a different set of related repos?

[anvaka]

Thank you!

The connections are inferred from stargazers. If they lead to different set of related projects it might be a sign that different group of people gave stars different things at that time.

Github of course has much more dimensions than a flat 2d surface can show

[irrational]

Is there a page that explains what the island names mean? I understand Minecraftria, but Fluttopia (and most others)? No clue.

[detaro]

it usually becomes clear when zooming in and looking at the examples. E.g. "Fluttopia" is Flutter-related repos.

[speedgoose]

From the project readme on GitHub:

> A lot of country labels were generated with help of ChatGPT. If you find something wrong, you can right click it, edit, and send a pull request - I'd be grateful.

[zX41ZdbW]

I found many ClickHouse-related projects in a dedicated cluster - "House of Clicks" :)

But ClickHouse itself somehow appears in Kubernation, and ClickBench - in Datapolis. Nice names btw.

[bluefishinit]

This is really neat! Are there any insights you gleaned from doing this that were unexpected?

[anvaka]

I knew GitHub is not a tiny website, but I didn't imagine how big it actually is. Each of those dots are giant parts of someone's life.

There are a lot of interests that I didn't know exist. For example https://github.com/cat-milk/Anime-Girls-Holding-Programming-... - someone collects anime girls holding programming books.

https://github.com/tylertreat/Comcast - and here is someone who is amazing at coming up with funny project names =)

[pvaldes]

Somebody has been doing a lot of Covid-19 plots in Gnu-R

[rightbyte]

This is really neat. Clustering of data like this makes for so interesting graphics.

[sethkim]

Very cool!

If you work on a dynamic version that allows users to understand changes in the open-source topography over time and detect/predict new clusters, this could be a very powerful tool for investment intelligence.

[mxmilkiib]

Easier than maintaining a wiki!

https://wiki.thingsandstuff.org/Audio etc.

[__MatrixMan__]

This is so fun, thanks for making it.

I bet that several of these regions have a common image in their readme (the python logo, the nix logo, etc). Imagine little flags popping out of each region...

[anvaka]

haha, I love the flags idea :). I wish I had the prowess to implement it in a way that is visually appealing and not obscuring the map.

I would also love to have a giant octocat hugging the archipelago, with some radial gradient emitting inside of it. Alas my design-gl foo is not there yet