Understanding open source communities with Quine

Hey there! 👋 This is Rodrigo from Quine!

Quine helps you accelerate your career as a developer by helping you find repos to work on and simplifying each step in your contributor journey.

In previous posts I showed you how you can use Quine in the discovery process of your journey, but what happens once you find an interesting repo card? You have to decide if you really like the repo and want to invest the energy to contribute to it.

In this post I will show you how you can use Quine to better understand the activity, metrics, and quality of an open source community you have just discovered. At Quine, we geek out on data, stats, and ML (and a few other things to be honest 😄), so we took a quantitative approach.

Our ambitions here are BIG and we'll write more about this very soon. For now, our starting point is what we internally dub as “Repo Detail Page”.

So what’s repo detail page? Clicking on a repo card in Quine directs you to a page with a unified view of the key information in the repository. This is what we call repo detail page (or RDP). At the top of the page you'll be able to find basic links and metadata about the repo. In this post we explain the components of RDP by considering four questions it can help you answer.

Q1. How popular is this repo?

One of the first things people look at when browsing repos on GitHub is its number of stargazers. This makes total sense! Stargazers are an indicator of popularity, which correlates with the amount of kudos and community support that a repo has earned over time. Our stargazer chart helps you visualise this by drawing the cumulative all-time stargazer growth of a repo. If you want a more granular view, its six months (6M) and one year (1Y) views are just a click away!

Q2. How quickly are PRs and Issues responded to?

Navigate the tab above the stargazer figure to get to the issue response time graph which charts the amount of time it takes for someone to comment on recently submitted issues. This chart can help you understand the responsiveness of a repo’s community and get a better understanding of whether the repo is actively maintained or not. The median response time is displayed in the bottom left corner.

By clicking on the PR merge label, your view will switch to the PR response time graph. This figure records the time that PRs have taken to be merged in the history of the repo. Use it to learn more about the availability of the repo's maintainers or the experience of previous contributors.

Q3. Are there any issues I can start working on?

Scroll all the way down to find a list of open good-first-issues. The rows are enriched with labels and timestamps to help you understand what type of work is available and how fresh the issue is. Click on the "Solve" button to open a new tab directing you to the official issue page on GitHub.

Remember that with great power comes great responsibility! Make sure you read the repo's contributing guidelines (found in the CONTRIBUTING.md file) before you attempt to solve an issue. Sometimes, you might have to explicitly express interest to be assigned to it. Maintainers are always very busy helping contributors get around, so be kind and be real when you interact with them 🙏

Q4. Are there any other repos like this one?

Maybe, after looking at all this information you have learned that this repo is not really for you. Maybe it's unmaintained or there are no good-first-issues that interest you. Whatever the case might be you need more options... so we're giving you options.

The right hand side of RDP contains a list of the most similar repos. These lists are computed in-house by crunching the metadata and content of repos on GitHub (we'll write a post about this at some point). So go ahead and scroll around to find potential alternatives to any repo in our index. You might be pleasantly surprised :)

Have you played around with RDP? Tell us in the comments what you think or what we could make a bit better for you 🙂