X-Ray Search GitHub, Communities and Speaker Pages

When to use it

The prompt

Write me search strings to find {{Job Title}} candidates outside LinkedIn. SKILLS / TECH: {{the specific technologies}} LOCATION: {{city or region, or "remote in {{country}}"}} SENIORITY SIGNAL I'M AFTER: {{e.g. maintains a project, speaks at meetups, writes about this area}} Give me search strings for: 1. GitHub, using both its own search syntax (users by location, language and followers; repositories by topic) and a Google x-ray of github.com. 2. Package registries and model hubs relevant to this skill set — npm, PyPI, crates.io, Hugging Face — to find maintainers rather than users. 3. Conference and meetup speaker pages, and personal blogs or newsletters on this topic. 4. Publicly searchable community spaces for this skill (Stack Overflow, Dev.to, project forums), with an honest note on whether each is still active enough for this skill to be worth the time. 5. Any other public source genuinely worth trying for this role. For each, explain in plain English what the string is filtering for and where it'll produce false positives. Then tell me what on a public profile is a real signal of ability versus what just means the person has free time, and how to find contact details the person chose to make public rather than scraping ones they didn't.

Tip

Contribution graphs are close to meaningless, since plenty of excellent engineers do all their work in private repos. What someone chose to build, and how they explain it in a README or a talk, tells you far more than how green their calendar is.

How to use it

Paste the prompt into ChatGPT, Claude or whichever assistant you use, then replace every {{bracketed}} part with your own detail. The more specific and messier your input, the better the output — a model given raw notes has more to work with than one given a tidy summary you wrote first.

More Sourcing prompts

Open the full tool for all 87 prompts, the glossary, and the JD decoder.