Sourcerer is a'visual profile for software engineers'. Effectively, it is a service and command-line app that scans your Git repos and builds a visual representation of the technology you work with in your projects.

You link the service up with your GitHub (or GitLab or BitBucket) account and then the service will scan your public (not private) repos and build a Sourcerer profile page representing your code.

To my mind, this page serves as a far more interesting talking point than a resume or CV. The problem with CVs is that, while someone 'says' that they can code this and have that experience - how do you really know?

• Does it mean that they code a little bit of JavaScript or a lot?
• When they list PHP on their resume, does that actually mean they edited a WordPress template that one time?
• When they say they know Angular, did they just do a Hello World and call it a day?

Granted, once can provide provide links to work, but unless it is a personal portfolio or project, it is not a very good gauge on an individual's contributions. Often times, people work in teams on larger projects, with multiple contributors and different stages of the project. Viewing any particular site shows what the team has done over a period of time, not necessarily the individual in the team.

GitHub profiles are also very useful, since you can see what someone has actually done. But GitHub comes with the downside that, if you work for a company that keeps its repos private, then chances are that, unless you contribute to open source prolifically, your GitHub repos are probably more a collection of oddities than a true representation of ability. That is unless you have a convincing side project on there, publicly available.

Sourcerer fills the gap between resume and public GitHub profile very well! In addition to their online service, Sourcerer provide a command-line app that lets you scan your local repos and send the various stats and facts to your Sourcerer profile. This way, you can provide real stats on your day-to-day work if your GitHub profile is not that significant.

You can find the command-line app here.

You install it from the command-line by:

curl -s https://sourcerer.io/app/install | bash

From there, you run: sourcerer

The app will prompt you to provide the file path and Sourcerer will scan the repo. One thing to note here is that you need to provide the email address linked to your Git commits for that repo in order for them to appear on your profile.

Note: Your personal email will not appear on your profile anywhere, nor is your code sent to any servers or made public. Sourcerer just scans the repos for the data such as: number of commits, technology/frameworks used, lines of code, dates/times etc.

Profile

On the Sourcere profile page itself, as an example, you can see mine here.

Up top if shows the number of commits, repos and lines of code. Below that is a colourful timeline/graph that highlights the different technologies you work with. Beneath that, it shows a breakdown of the broader technology categories you work with and then below that goes into more details in terms of the libraries and frameworks. Finally, it wraps up with some "Fun facts" with graphs showing your most active times, days on which you commit most and then some stats indicating some demographics in terms of how much you use certain tech in contract with generalised stats.

As cool as all of this is, it should be taken with a pinch of salt in that, these stats look at numbers... they do not look at code quality. So one still needs to take the time to dig deeper. However, a service like, at a glance, provides a great, high-level overview of the work a developer does!