Thanks for asking me to work on this. I will get started on it and keep this PR's description up to date as I form a plan and make progress.

GitHub Uganda User Scraper Script (Ethical + Practical)

Goal: Build a script that finds GitHub users who appear to be in Uganda by using public GitHub search and profile data, then exports the results (CSV/JSON) for analysis.

Important: GitHub does not provide a guaranteed “country” field for all users. “Location” is free-text and can be missing or messy, so treat results as best-effort.

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✅ What the script will do

1. Use GitHub’s Search Users API to find accounts where:
   • location:"Uganda" OR
   • location:"Kampala" / Entebbe / Jinja / Mbarara etc.
2. For each user found, fetch:
   • username, name
   • location
   • bio
   • followers/following
   • public repos
   • profile URL
   • email (rarely public)
3. Deduplicate + normalize
4. Save to:
   • uganda_users.json
   • uganda_users.csv

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⚠️ Rules + rate limits (don’t get blocked)

• Use a GitHub token (PAT) to increase rate limits.
• Add delays + backoff when rate-limited.
• Respect GitHub API Terms and avoid aggressive scraping.
• Prefer GitHub API over HTML scraping.

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Tech stack options

Option A (Recommended): Node.js + Octokit

• Easy JSON handling
• Nice GitHub client libraries
• Great for scheduling + retries

Option B: Python + Requests

• Great for data science workflows
• Easy CSV export

Below is a Node.js plan (since you use JS a lot).

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1) Project setup (Node.js)

Requirements

• Node.js 18+
• A GitHub Personal Access Token (classic or fine-grained)

Env

• GITHUB_TOKEN=...

Install

• @octokit/rest (GitHub API client)
• dotenv
• p-limit (limit concurrency)
• csv-writer (CSV export)

---

2) Search strategy

Because location is free-text, run multiple queries and merge.

Example Uganda location queries

• location:"Uganda"
• location:"Kampala"
• location:"Entebbe"
• location:"Jinja"
• location:"Mbarara"
• location:"Gulu"
• location:"Mbale"
• location:"Mukono"
• location:"Wakiso"

You can also include variants:

• location:"UG"
• location:"Uga"
• emojis or typos (optional)

Optional filters (helps reduce noise)

• repos:>5
• followers:>10

Example query:

• location:"Kampala" repos:>3

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3) Pagination

GitHub Search API returns up to:

• 100 results/page
• practical limits for search queries (you may need multiple queries)

Plan:

• For each query:
  • fetch pages 1..N until no results or a max cap
  • collect logins
• Deduplicate by login

---

4) Data normalization

Normalize location text

• lowercase
• trim spaces
• map known aliases:
  • "kampala ug" → "kampala, uganda"
  • "uganda" → "uganda"

Uganda match heuristic

A user counts as “Uganda” if location contains:

• uganda OR any city list OR ug (careful) OR common forms like kampala, ug

This reduces false positives.

---

5) Concurrency + rate limit safety

• Fetch user details in parallel, but limited to small concurrency (like 3–8).
• If GitHub returns 403 + rate limit headers:
  • wait until reset time
  • retry

---

6) Output schema

JSON record example

{
  "login": "octocat",
  "name": "The Octocat",
  "location": "Kampala, Uganda",
  "bio": "Frontend dev",
  "followers": 120,
  "following": 40,
  "public_repos": 35,
  "blog": "https://...",
  "twitter_username": "....",
  "company": "....",
  "email": null,
  "html_url": "https://github.com/octocat",
  "created_at": "2017-01-01T00:00:00Z",
  "updated_at": "2026-02-01T00:00:00Z",
  "source_query": "location:\"Kampala\" repos:>3"
}

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