How we calculate your DevRank

Quine's goal with DevRank is to create a balanced and equitable measure of GitHub user contributions and influence within the platform.

DevRank is a measure of a GitHub user's reputation; it's based on Google's PageRank, a widely used method for ranking web pages in search engine results. The technique is applied to the contribution network of GitHub, connecting stargazers (people who "star" or like a project) to contributors.

🤓 How we calculate DevRank:

Your DevRank, or developer reputation, depends on the reputation of others who like your project. Their reputation, in turn, depends on other developers’ reputations that like their project.

This forms something like a “global reputation flow”. To calculate the reputation that everyone has, we use the PageRank algorithm (used by Google to rank pages) to find a “steady state of this reputation flow”.

To understand this concept, imagine that there are many people in the GitHub community, and they all have different levels of reputation based on their contributions and the reputation of others who like their work. It is like a big network where reputation flows from one person to another.

PageRank looks at this network and calculates the reputation of each person by considering the reputation they receive from others and the reputation they give to others. It keeps repeating this calculation and adjusting the reputation values until it reaches a point where the reputation flow doesn't change much anymore.

This is called a "steady state" because the reputation values have settled and are not changing dramatically.

We finish off by multiplying everyone's "steady state score" (this usually looks like 0.0000[..]0000002%) by the total number of stars on Github (as of the time of writing there are 320 Millions stars) to finally obtain your DevRank!

📈 Improving your DevRank:

It's important to understand that you only get a share of a project's future growth, not its current reputation.

DevRank generally increases slowly over time, the way owning shares in a company works. In contrast, if a project becomes popular after your contribution, you will benefit a lot from it!