I visualized 26,000 open-source developers on a 3D globe — here's what I learned about the global dev community

Sajeetharan — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 04:55:11 +0000

I've always been curious: where do the world's most impactful open-source developers actually live? Which cities produce the most stars? Is the "Silicon Valley dominates everything" narrative still true?

So I built DevGlobe — an interactive 3D globe that maps 26,000+ top open-source developers to their real-world locations, scored and ranked by their actual contributions.

How it works

Every developer is scored 0–100 using a composite algorithm across 6 dimensions:

Dimension	Weight	Source
GitHub Stars	25%	Total stars across all repos
GitHub Commits	25%	Yearly commit activity
Repo Reach	20%	Forks + watchers
SO Reputation	15%	StackOverflow reputation
SO Engagement	10%	Answer acceptance × count
Community	5%	Followers + badges

All dimensions are log-normalized to prevent one mega-repo from dominating the scores.

The data pipeline

The data comes from three sources, stitched together by a Node.js pipeline:

GitHub GraphQL API — pulls top developers by follower count, then fetches their stars, commits, repos, and languages
StackOverflow API — enriches profiles with reputation, answer count, and badges
Geocoding — converts free-text locations ("SF", "Bangalore, India", "🇧🇷") into lat/lng coordinates

The final dataset is stored in Azure Cosmos DB with vector embeddings, enabling semantic search.

AI-powered search

This is the part I'm most proud of. You can type natural language queries like:

"Python developer working on AI and deep learning"
"Full stack JavaScript developer in London"
"Linux kernel contributors"

It uses Azure OpenAI embeddings + Cosmos DB vector search to find semantically relevant developers — not just keyword matching.

The search supports three modes:

Text — fast client-side filtering by name, username, location
Vector — semantic similarity via embeddings
Hybrid — combines both using Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF)

Interesting patterns I found

After staring at this globe for way too long, here's what stood out:

The US West Coast and Western Europe dominate, but clusters in India, China, and Brazil are growing rapidly
C and JavaScript developers are the most geographically distributed
The top 100 developers live in just ~12 cities — San Francisco, London, Beijing, Bangalore, Berlin, Tokyo, Shanghai, New York, Singapore, Sydney, Toronto, Portland
StackOverflow reputation doesn't correlate strongly with GitHub stars — the top GitHub developers rarely answer SO questions, and top SO contributors often have modest repos
Eastern Europe punches above its weight — Ukraine, Poland, and Czech Republic have disproportionately high scores per capita

Tech stack

Layer	Technology
Frontend	React 19, Three.js (react-globe.gl), Next.js 15
Search	Azure Cosmos DB (vector + hybrid search)
Embeddings	Azure OpenAI (text-embedding-3-small)
API	Next.js API Routes
Hosting	Vercel
Data Pipeline	Node.js (GitHub GraphQL, StackOverflow API, geocoding)

Try it yourself

Live demo: devglobe.vercel.app

GitHub: github.com/sajeetharan/devglobe

The project runs locally with zero configuration — no API keys needed. Just:

git clone https://github.com/sajeetharan/devglobe.git
cd devglobe
npm install
npm run dev

It ships with sample data (20 developers) so you can explore the UI immediately. For the full database experience, there's a one-command script to seed the Cosmos DB Emulator locally.

What's next

Country-specific landing pages (SEO for "top developers in X")
Embeddable profile badges for GitHub READMEs
Time-series view showing how the developer landscape shifts over years
More data sources (GitLab, npm downloads, conference talks)

Contributing

The project is fully open source and contributions are welcome. The CONTRIBUTING.md has all the details. Whether it's improving the scoring algorithm, adding data sources, or fixing UI bugs — PRs are appreciated.

If you find it useful, a ⭐ on the repo helps a lot!

Built by @sajeetharan

Hi, I'm Sajeetharan

Sajeetharan — Tue, 11 Apr 2017 04:16:31 +0000

With over 8 years of experience in the ICT industry, Sajeetharan Sinnathurai is a full stack developer, an enthusiast in Cloud and Web Development. He currently works at Microsoft as a Technical Evangelist. His skill in Web Application Architecture, Cloud and more has seen him become a Microsoft MVP in Developer Technologies, Google developer expert in Web technology. Sajeetharan is also the top contributor on stack Overflow in Sri Lanka and he ranks among the top 10 contributors in the world on Angular, Cosmos DB, etc. He is also a reviewer on https://www.packtpub.com/ .He now focuses on channeling his knowledge into open source projects and sharing it with the community by mentoring,creating POCS,running workshops,writing blogs to help make the world a better and more developed place.

DEV Community: Sajeetharan