It just starts with how I could check if a person I followed on GitHub follows me back, or wanting to know if someone who starred my project started following me. I checked out some open source tools on GitHub and discovered a few, but the majority of them have limitations. First, they rely on the github rest api, so even if you decide to provide your PAT token, you are still stuck at around 5.000 requests (combining both following and followers). That’s not good for large accounts like Evan You or a really popular gitHub user with more than 5k followers. Second, they are either CLI tools that return another raw list or require you to sign up (and even in those cases, they are still stuck with the github rest api limitations and can't scale).

So, I decided to create my own tool that others could use. But why just create another tool similar to the rest? I searched for a touch of originality and wanted to see the link, something we have in common. That's where the idea of countries came in... and so, a map for my GitHub network, which is just the translation for Git Charta (let's use Latin instead of another Greek word, I've always been passionate about Latin outside of Lorem Ipsum...).

There were two main difficulties I found during the first phase of development. First, translating the GitHub location field, which is just raw, optional text, into a country code, because I wanted a personal, lightweight geocoding algorithm. The second one was about scaling, as I discovered that the GitHub GraphQL API sometimes returns wrong or missing data. The solution I found was using the github rest api as a fallback to retrieve all missing data.

Enough long personal talk, what do you think about it? It's still under development, especially the backend part...