Who’s the Hirschest of them all?

Just in time for the world’s fair of software, GitHub Universe 2024, Prog.AI launched a variant of the h-index, specifically for open-source developers.

We built a simple web app hosted on our site https://www.getprog.ai/open-source-h-index so you might as well stop reading, head over there, enter your GitHub handle, and check out your number (and your open-source buddies’ too).

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For those of you who’ve been coding under a rock, the H-index, introduced in 2005 by physicist Jorge E. Hirsch, measures a researcher’s impact by balancing publication output with citation frequency. It reflects both the quantity and quality of their work. Originally created to assess individual scientists, it’s now applied to journals, research groups, and even institutions. A high h-index often correlates with major achievements—think Nobel Prizes (most winners have an h-index over 70), prestigious academic positions, and research fellowships. You can check yours on Google Scholar. 

The Open Source Hirsch Index, introduced by Prog.AI, is a graph algorithm similar to the academic h-index. The index is equal to N if a developer has at least N projects, each with at least N commits from the developer, and each project has at least N stars.

Hirsch ≥ 27 is like winning a Nobel Prize—only a few hundred people reach this level.

Hirsch ≥ 13 puts you in the top 10,000, which is on par with earning an Olympic medal.

Hirsch ≥ 8 places you in the top 100,000, where you’ll find people making a serious impact in tech—think billionaires and CTOs of unicorn companies.

Hirsch ≥ 3 lands you in the top 1 million, the marathoners of the industry.

Prog.AI’s platform is based on a dataset of 60 million developer profiles. By analyzing every GitHub commit, our machine learning algorithms infer the skills and experience of each developer. We pull data from GitHub, Stack Overflow, and LinkedIn to create unified profiles. Now, let’s put some faces to the numbers:

Simon Willison simonw, co-creator of Python’s Django framework and author of several libraries for LLMs and Python, ranks even higher than Linus Torvalds thanks to his contributions across various libraries. He has an Open Source h-index is 33 and is ranked 336 in the world.

Linus Torvalds torvalds, creator of Linux OS and Git, despite his monumental contributions to open-source software, has an Open Source h-index is 30, placing him at 504 in the world.

Guido van Rossum gvanrossum, creator of Python, has an Open Source h-index of 22 and ranks 2,179. His H-index is nearly double that of Scala’s creator, Martin Odersky, likely due to Python's global popularity.

Vitalik Buterin vbuterin, creator of Ethereum, has an Open Source h-index of 19, placing him at 4,051.

Thomas Wolf thomwolf, co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Hugging Face, has an Open Source h-index of 13, placing him at 15,215.

Martin Odersky odersky, creator of Scala, is known for his contributions to type theory and programming language design, including his influence on Java generics. His OpOpen Source h-index is 11, placing him at 24,672.

Matei Zaharia mateiz, creator of Apache Spark and co-founder of Databricks, net worth $1.2B. Matei balances his role as a scientist with being CTO of Databricks. His Open Source h-index is 9, placing him at 43,133.

The academic and Open Source Hirsch indexes aren’t the only ways to rank professionals by their influence. Chess players, for example, have the Elo rating system (its formula even made a cameo in The Social Network, written on glass). In math, there’s the Erdős number. Websites use PageRank. And, of course, we can’t forget the Bacon number for actors.

See you (and your numbers) at GitHub Universe!