An org chart written in commits
A people database tells you that someone is a Senior Software Engineer at acme. It does not tell you whether they work on the payments service or the marketing site, whether they write Go or TypeScript, or whether they are the person everyone else's changes wait on.
For companies that build in the open, GitHub does. The organisation lists its repositories. Each repository lists who commits to it and how much. Each profile shows what else that person builds. Put together, that is a map of who builds what: the closest thing to an engineering org chart that exists in public, and it is free to read.
Sourcing engineers on proof of work starts from a job spec and searches all of GitHub by language and location. This play starts from the other end: one named company, and everything its public footprint says about the team inside it.
What you get back
Two tables. By repository: language, activity, contributors ranked by commits, and the maintainers. By person: name, GitHub profile, whether they look like staff or an outside contributor and why, the repositories and languages they work in, and LinkedIn where they linked it. Plus one line per company comparing the engineers visible on GitHub with the number the people databases list.
Variations worth knowing
Before a pitch. Skip contact details. Knowing that a prospect runs a small platform team looking after dozens of services is a better opening than any hiring signal, and it belongs in the account brief.
Before a raid. Run it on the firms you source from by name, with your off-limits list applied first. You approach the maintainer of the system your client needs rebuilt, not a title.
Several companies, one stack. Mapped side by side, organisations show where a language or framework is concentrated in your market and who the recognised maintainers are.
Where this goes wrong
Reading the map as the team. Membership of an organisation is hidden unless the person chooses to show it, and private repositories are invisible. What you see is the minimum, never the headcount.
Counting drive-by contributors as staff. One fixed typo is not employment. Without a stated employer or a sustained share of commits, the person is an outsider until shown otherwise.
Approaching people through their commits. Lead with LinkedIn. A recruiter email to an address published for bug reports lands badly in a community that talks to itself.
Companies with nothing public. Plenty of strong engineering teams have an empty organisation. A thin map there says nothing about the team and everything about the company's policy on open source.
