I built MergeMax since I kept seeing people post on X about @poteto's merge count and I knew I could probably create something to easily see her and other popular dev's GitHub public PRs. I quickly found out however that her PRs aren't visible via our methods, since most of her PRs are private/not on GitHub. I also wanted to create a place where people can easily see the amount of merges top accounts do each month, now that agents have the ability to create thousands of PRs themselves.
Currently we only support public PRs as well as the contribution total that gets provided by GitHub directly:
- A public PR only counts if it's public, merged, and authored by the account that's being looked up, and merged within the specified period.
- I use GitHub's search API for PR counts. In a single GraphQL query we ask for 1 day per alias (is:pr is:merged is:public author:X merged:DATE), a whole month costs about 1 rate-limit point. If we had to page through PRs it would cost about 400 points per busy account.
- Initially I tried GH Archive first, but PR events there no longer say whether a PR was merged.
Current limitations include:
- People that merged their own PRs also count.
- Agent workflows can increase a person's PR count by a lot. So a bot can generate thousands of small PRs.
- Private work and pushes directly to main don't show as public PRs. Those profiles do, however, show up in GitHub's contribution count if they've activated private contributions on GitHub.
I had to seed about 1,000 accounts at launch and anyone who's been looked up since is also tracked. We obviously cannot track every single account on GitHub.
It really became one of my most fun projects to work on. Especially loved creating the colorscheme/theme. Itterating through top 3 leaderboard designs, user profile look & feel, etc.
I do support sponsor cards like some other popular similar sites but we don't have any sponsors yet.
The stack I used was Tanstack Start deployed to Vercel with Convex as the backend.
I'm open to any questions and feedback regarding the site, how it functions etc. Also would love to hear what you would like to see added to profiles, new boards, etc?