The GitHub UI is great if you want to see which issues are assigned to you, or for planning out your next milestone iteration, or if you’re optimizing :zzz:zzzzzzzzzz god i’m already bored talking about all this work stuff. Let’s find out how many open source projects have a label named ¯\_(ツ)_/¯:
Okay, there’s only one. But there are two with a label of ಠ_ಠ. This opens up a world of opportunity for issue triage here, people.
Some ground rules
I’m going to run through a bunch of advanced search terms that GitHub lets you filter on. Two places to use these: the global github.com/search search page, and the repository search page (here’s Bootstrap’s search page, for example).
Take special note of any filter syntax here that might help you in your day-to-day job, and then forget all about them and go eat a donut or something.
Titles
Make no mistake: programmers make mistakes. For example, use in:title to specifically search the title field and see all of the reverts of reverted reverts:
is:pr "revert revert revert" in:title
Still cedes the victor chair to those who have reverted reverts of reverted reverts, though:
is:pr "revert revert revert revert" in:title
Merged Pull Requests
Specifying is:pr and is:merged will filter by pull requests that have been merged.
Here’s a few thousand pulls that blaze a trail:
is:merged is:pr "don't merge this"
Luckily there is one among us that realize programmers don’t read anything and need a little more explicit encouragement.
is:pr "for the love of god don't merge this"
That pull was merged, too, btw.
Date spans
According to Google Trends, brogrammers really hit their stride in July 2011:
We should dig deeper, though, and figure out who were the bro trailblazers before brogrammers were a thing.
created:, updated:, merged:, and closed: all accept datestamps, either before or after scopes, with <YYYY-MM-DD and >YYYY-MM-DD, or ranges, like YYYY-MM-DD..YYYY-MM-DD. So, assuming the birth of the brogrammer term hit around July 2011, we can scientifically verify who bro’d it up before it was (un)cool. Basically bro hipsters. Or brosters.
created:<2011-07-01 bro
Languages
Drop a language: filter in your query and you can get instant ammunition for language flamewars.
For example, there’s a half-dozen issues in Go repositories talking about metaprogramming:
language:go metaprogramming
Ruby developers, on the other hand, CAN”T GET ENOUGH METAPROGRAMMING in their 400 issues, which are all probably dynamically referencing each other, although it’d take a few hours to figure out exactly how they’re doing that before we give up and just rewrite the goddamn thing in six small methods instead god why do I have to do this every single time oh right here’s the syntax:
language:ruby metaprogramming
Also here are a bunch of eager beavers:
language:objective-c swift rewrite
Comments
Here’s a list of folk who probably commented on a heavily-trafficked thread, likely posted in a funny meme photo, and then got real mad that they got millions of notifications from people doing the same thing afterwards:
comments:>50 unsubscribe thread
You can also narrow searches just to the comments with in:comments. Here’s a bunch of open pulls that got the shipit squirrel — :shipit: — dropped in them:
in:comments is:open is:pr shipit
Mentions
The mentions: filter lets you search through all issues and pull requests that mention a specific user.
Here, we can see the number of people complimenting Linus on his inclusive demeanor:
mentions:torvalds sweet demeanor
More reading
Would you like to know more? The full list of search filters are listed on the help site.