Linus Torvalds is not a Githero user

Why he shows up here anyway

Githero ranks GitHub profiles. Early on, someone asked what would happen if Linus Torvalds signed up. The honest answer is that he would top the leaderboard and everyone else would be competing for second place. So we made him the running joke: the example profile on the landing page, the permanent number one, the person our posts on X keep losing to.

None of that is real. The example profile is mock data. The leaderboard entry is a placeholder. The jokes are jokes. He is a mascot, used in good faith, and the punchline is always that we are small and he is not.

What we actually think of him

Linus wrote the first Linux kernel in 1991 as a hobby project and then spent the next three decades running the largest collaborative software project in history. He also wrote Git in 2005, in about a week, because the alternatives annoyed him. Every commit this site counts, every pull request it ranks, every contribution graph it makes fun of, exists because of a tool he built out of irritation.

Githero is a small site that turns GitHub activity into a game. It sits on top of Git, which sits on top of Linux, which runs the servers, which run on more of his work. We are, in the most literal sense, a footnote on his footnote. That is the joke, and it is also the truth.

Where the line is

• We do not claim he uses, endorses, or is aware of Githero.
• We do not collect, store, or display any real data about him.
• We do not put words in his mouth. When we quote him, it is something he actually said in public.
• If he, or anyone acting for him, would rather we stopped, we will. Same day. No argument. Reach us through the contact page.

To Linus, in the unlikely event

Thank you for Linux. Thank you for Git. Sorry about the memes. The leaderboard spot is yours whenever you want it, though we suspect you have better things to do.