With all the recent active development on my e107 Importer WordPress plugin , I increased my public code contributions. This had the nice side effect of bumping my ranking on Open Hub from #8 (bronze level) to #9 (silver level):

Other interesting statistic is that I’m now ranked as open-source developer number 5673 on a population of 438276. Which place me in the top 1.3% of the population! :D

That’s exciting, but irrelevant. Open Hub stats must be taken with a huge grain of salt.

  1. Some code are duplicated: my WordPress plugin is both present in my personal GitHub repository and in WordPress official plugin repository , inflating contributions on this project by 2.

  2. Not all open-source projects are tracked in Open Hub. Which make developer registered on Open Hub seems to be part of a smaller community.

  3. Not all developers on Open Hub have aggregated their repository accounts under one identity, making those who’ve done this looks like bigger contributors compared to others. This also artificially inflate the global population.

  4. Open-source contributions are not necessary in code repositories. Think about project promotion, maintenance of forges and websites, documentation, bug reports, testing, benchmarking, support (in mailing-lists, IRC and forums), …

  5. And most importantly, the best contributions are not always tied to high commit activity or number of added code lines. Thinks about removing old/dead/legacy code and refactoring. These may be the best code contributions a project will see.

That’s why Open Hub stats must not be taken for granted. But this doesn’t remove the fun you can get from them. Especially when they put me in a favorable light! ;)