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Matt was new to Berlin and had no easy way of finding good developers. To kick off his search, he thought about his key criteria for finding the perfect candidate – in his case, evidence of personal projects and personal network – and looked at what tools were available. Although he found Github a great source for developers, he found it difficult to prioritise them. So Matt developed code to query the GitHub API and analyse the social graph of the Berlin subset of their users. Bingo! For more details see Matt’s blog.

Sounds like a great idea if you’re recruiting for developers – or if you’re a developer who likes the idea of a job finding you, rather than spending all your ‘free’ time searching job papers, online job sites and fending off agencies trying to persuade you to interview you for a role you’re wholly unsuitable for (or hate).

Of course Matt’s solution is restricted to developers who publish code to GitHub, but it’s an interesting approach all the same.

The Guardian’s commentary loops in the Jeff Atwood article I referenced yesterday (great minds think alike? Hmmm maybe not…) about the difficulty in finding programmers who can actually code. The article asks whether we can stop people copying other people’s code, but I think the most pressing question is how to stop people saying they can code when they can’t, not least because it puts experienced, highly skilled programmers into the same tarnished bucket.

Jeff wrote his original article on the subject – ‘Why can’t programmers…programme?’ – two years ago and bemoans that fact that not much seems to have changed since then. The interesting thing is the online test Mike Lin created to get round the problem he was finding with sourcing people who could actually code. It might save you a lot of time if you’re hiring – Mike now only interviews people who can write a simple 10-line program.

For anyone who doesn’t write code themselves (or hasn’t for a long time), how else do you know if someone can actually do what they say they can do? And more importantly, why do the candidates think they can get away with it?