Choose a Job You Love: Predicting Choices of GitHub Developers

Abstract

GitHub is one of the most commonly used web-based code repository hosting service. Majority of projects hosted on GitHub are really small but, on the other hand, developers spend most of their time working in medium to large repositories. Developers can freely join and leave projects following their current needs and interests. Based on real data collected from GitHub we have tried to predict which developer will join which project. A mix of carefully selected list of features and machine learning techniques let us achieve a precision of 0.886, in the best case scenario, where there is quite a long history of a user and a repository in the system. Even when proposed classifier faces a cold start problem, it delivers precision equal to 0.729 which is still acceptable for automatic recommendation of noteworthy projects for developers.