I Know What You Coded Last Summer: Mining Candidate Expertise from GitHub Repositories

Rohit Saxena, Niranjan Pedanekar

Abstract: Resumes and social recommendations are often high-level indicators of a candidate's technical skillset. In this paper, we present a method to create a more detailed technology skill profile of a candidate based on her code repository contributions. For this purpose, we annotate user contributions to GitHub code repositories with technology tags found in Stack Overflow questions and answers (Q&A) in an unsupervised manner. We also present SkillMap, a visual representation of candidate skill profile, for quick review and comparison with other candidate profiles. We create SkillMaps for 66 Java programmers and present a preliminary qualitative assessment though manual analysis and interviews of technical recruiters.