Gitphere

Paste a GitHub username and see where the people they follow are based, plotted on a Cobe globe.

Stack

• Next.js 16 with App Router and TypeScript
• shadcn/ui primitives for Button, Input, and Card, added manually
• Cobe v2 for the WebGL globe
• GitHub REST API for the following list and user locations
• Nominatim with OpenStreetMap for free geocoding, with an in-memory cache

Run it

npm install
npm run dev

Open localhost:3000, enter a GitHub username such as AbhiVarde, and hit Go.

Optional: Increase GitHub Rate Limits

Unauthenticated GitHub requests are limited to 60 requests per hour, shared across the app. For higher limits, add a GitHub token:

# .env.local

GITHUB_TOKEN=ghp_xxxxxxxxxxxx

A token with no scopes is enough because the app only reads public profiles.

How It Works

1. GET /api/following?username=X calls GitHub's GET /users/{username}/following endpoint.
2. For each user, the app fetches GET /users/{login} to read their profile location.
3. Users without a location are skipped because GitHub stores locations as free text.
4. Each unique location is geocoded once through Nominatim and cached in memory.
5. Resolved latitude and longitude coordinates are passed to the globe as markers.

Known Limitations

• A GitHub location is whatever the user entered in their profile, not GPS coordinates. Locations such as earth, remote, or made-up places may fail to geocode and will be skipped.
• The in-memory geocode cache resets after every server restart or serverless cold start. For larger traffic, this could be moved to Redis or a database.
• Nominatim's usage policy limits requests to around one per second, so geocoding is intentionally throttled.
• X/Twitter following data requires a paid API tier, so GitHub is the only supported platform for now.