Leaving university degrees aside, probably one of the most significant indicators of development expertise would be StackOverflow reputation. It is in fact so good that companies pay a lot of money to search for potential job candidates on that platform.
I wonder how a generalized version of such an IT expertise reputation system could look like. I was thinking of a decentralized GitHub where each commit you do as a developer is linked to your identity. Based off this data, and some metrics about how your code is used in production or is otherwise useful to humanity, a reputation balance could be derived.
Such a reputation that is derived from actual code you write could also be a great way of attaching a weight to each pull request review. If, for example, your reputation balance indicates you have years worth of experience in programming video card drivers in the Linux repository, your vote to accept a PR in that niche should score higher than a vote from someone else. Especially nice for open source projects with no clear core developer team.
A possible problem I see in using only commits as input would be that we incentivice developers to write more code, which may lead to the software quality suffering.
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I’m sorry to say this approach is flawed as software is mainly made as a team for the whims of a project. Even the individuel commits of a programmer are dependent of its context. Did the project has sufficent funding? Did it value quality, peer-reviewed code, or did it went for “quick’n dirty”?, etc.
Same problem in a OSS context, where even the best commits can be rejected for ideological/unrelated reasons.
Your idea might be a better fit for the reputation of software shops though.
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Also, important metric between good and great programmers is the time they take to have working ,quality, code.
With just a commit you can’t really know how long it tooked for the programmer to do it.
I do have a similar intention to build a top list of developers. Actually, it may not only include software developers.
As all kinds of jobs in reality need a skill, one worker or a team of workers leverage their skill to build products, such products can be viewed as NFT with tag enabled (like Video Game Player, Holochain Developer, IPFS Pinner), and can be further purchased or valued by others. The overall market or likes or follows of such products can reflect the influence then the reputation of the contributors. It makes sense to me to distribute the reputation based on special rules agreed on by the team who build the product, like for code use number of git commits.
Such top list can also be backed through some curation process like Token Curated Registry, but it may have more restrictions than the value it can provide.
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