Find who you need, for what you’re building.
Pick the situation you are actually in — a co-founder, a first contributor, a teammate for the weekend — and the guide answers it in those terms. Plaza ranks builders on evidence measured from their public repositories, not on claims. Every match cites the repositories it read and shows the arithmetic behind the ranking.
Find a technical co-founder you can trust
The riskiest hire a founder ever makes is the first one.
Find a co-founder, matched by verified skill
Co-founder dating sites are full of unverified profiles.
Hire remote developers, ranked by real evidence
Remote hiring means you can't rely on a warm intro.
Find open-source contributors for your project
Great maintainers are hard to find and easy to burn out.
Hire AI engineers, verified by shipped work
Everyone lists 'LLMs' on their resume now.
Find a hackathon teammate you can trust
Most hackathon teams fail on people, not tech.
Find a design partner who ships in code
The rarest early teammate is a designer who ships.
Find collaborators for your AI side project
Your AI side project needs one more builder to ship.
Find a mentor, verified by real work
Anyone can claim to be a mentor.
Build a small team for a grant or accelerator application
Applications are judged on the team as much as the idea.
Vet a technical co-founder before the equity conversation
Equity is the most expensive promise you will ever make on the thinnest information.
Find research collaborators, verified by shipped work
Good research collaborators are findable by their artifacts: the open-source implementation, the reproducible pipeline, the benchmark that actually runs.
What does Plaza actually measure about a collaborator?
Only public GitHub evidence, read through the REST API: languages counted in bytes, when each repo was last pushed, repos owned, followers and stars. Nothing is self-reported and no model invents a number — these are constants in the code.
- Skill strength
- 50% recency · 30% measured volume · 20% breadthThe three terms behind one skill's strength (app/lib/match.ts).
- Self-declared topics
- kept at 60% strengthA repo topic the owner typed is weaker evidence than bytes we counted, so it is discounted rather than trusted.
- Final ranking
- 85% skill coverage + 15% Trust ScoreCoverage dominates on purpose: the question is whether they can do this, not whether they are famous.
- Trust Score, out of 100
- code depth 28% · repos owned 18% · recency 15% · cadence 12% · account age 12% · stars 8% · followers 7%Seven components (app/lib/github-evidence.ts). Followers and stars — the two numbers you can accumulate without writing code — are worth 15% together.
- Recency half-life
- 60 daysNot a yes/no 'active' badge: someone who pushed yesterday reads differently from someone who pushed on day 89.
- Cadence window
- 90 days, saturating at 30 reposHow much ground an account covered recently, counted from push dates.
- Repos-owned band
- 1 repo to 100 reposLog-scaled between a floor that says nothing and a knee only the top of the real population reaches.
- Account-age band
- 6 months to 15 yearsMeasured from the GitHub account's own creation date, never self-reported.
- Language bytes read
- the 8 repos pushed most recentlyGitHub allows 60 unauthenticated REST requests in 1 hour, so byte-level detail is spent on the freshest work first.
- Cost to search
- US$0, no accountSigning in with GitHub is also free; it indexes your own public activity so others can find you.
- Contact limit
- 5 outgoing requests per 24 hoursA per-person cap, so nobody can be volume-mailed through Plaza.
- Sign-in session
- 30 daysA signed cookie, refreshed on sign-in. Plaza stores no password of yours at all.
How do you check that a developer really wrote what they claim?
Five things people actually do, and what each one can and cannot establish. Reading a CV proves nothing checkable; an interview measures interview performance; public code proves authorship but only of public code.
| Method | What it actually proves | Typical time | Cost | Where it fails |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A CV or résumé | Nothing checkable — every line is written by the candidate | 1–2 minutes to read | US$0 | No claim on it points at an artifact you can open |
| Reading their GitHub by hand | Authorship of public repos, if you open each one | 10–20 minutes per person | US$0 | Does not scale past a shortlist; forks and starred repos read like their own work |
| A technical interview | How they solve one fresh problem while watched | 45–60 minutes, two people | 1–2 hours of engineering time | Measures interview performance, not what they have shipped |
| A take-home exercise | New code they wrote for your prompt | 4–8 hours of theirs, 30 minutes of yours | Unpaid work, or a real fee | High dropout, and it still says nothing about their past work |
| Plaza's measurement | Bytes of each language in their public repos, push dates and stars — with every repo cited | Under 1 minute | US$0 | Blind to private and company-internal work, which is most work |
Only the last row is measured by Plaza. The times and costs on the other four are typical industry practice, stated as ranges — we did not measure them, and the table says so rather than dressing an estimate up as a finding.
Where can you verify all of this yourself?
Every input Plaza reads is a documented, public GitHub endpoint, and every figure above is a constant in open code. These are the first-party specs — not commentary about them.
- GitHub REST API — Repositories — the endpoint every repo, star count and push date on Plaza is read from
- GitHub REST API — Users — account age, public repo count and followers, the three account-level trust inputs
- GitHub REST API — rate limits — why an ingest reads language bytes for 8 repos and not for all of them
- GitHub's own OpenAPI description — the machine-readable contract for the responses above, published by GitHub
- api.github.com/rate_limit — live — open it and GitHub itself returns the 60-per-hour figure quoted above
- git log — Git reference manual — the same authorship record, readable offline once you have cloned the repo
- Open Source Guides — how to contribute — what public contribution history does and does not say about a person