Developer Platform / 2026
GitHub Orbit
An explainable, self-hosted network explorer for finding the people around your code.
GitHub Orbit
Design / code / deployment
Graph
Directed + 2-hop
Permissions
Progressive OAuth
Operations
Backups + workers
Overview
GitHub Orbit is a runnable, self-hosted network explorer rather than a static graph demo. It maps followers, following, mutuals, and second-hop communities; explains why a person is recommended; and includes the operational machinery needed to keep a graph product trustworthy over time.
The problem
GitHub exposes relationship data but does little to help developers understand the communities just beyond their immediate network. Naive recommendation systems are opaque, over-request OAuth access, and ignore rate limits, partial graph coverage, background refresh, and private saved state.
What I built
Orbit combines a directed relationship graph with deterministic scoring across network structure, profile similarity, topics, languages, activity, and exploration. Optional OpenRouter embeddings add semantic signal without becoming a hard dependency. OAuth begins read-only, requesting follow permission only at the moment it is needed.
My role
Solo product and systems ownership: interaction model, graph exploration, scoring design, OAuth and encrypted-token boundaries, persistence model, BullMQ synchronization, rate-limit metadata, secret sharing, Docker/Caddy deployment, migrations, health checks, and backup operations.
Biggest challenge
Recommendations must remain useful when GitHub data is partial and rate-limited. Showing the contributing signals—and carrying coverage state through the interface—turns uncertainty into an honest product behavior instead of a hidden failure mode.
Next project
Feather