Feature: Online/offline visual state for globe markers

[sajeetharan]

Summary

Visually distinguish between developers who are actively coding right now vs. those who are offline/historical.

Details

• Active developers: bright, glowing, or pulsing marker
• Recently active (last hour): slightly dimmed marker
• Offline/historical: static, muted marker
• Filter toggle: 'Show only active developers'
• Count indicator: 'X developers coding right now'

Why

A clear online/offline state makes the globe feel alive and helps users find developers who are available right now.

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Contributions welcome! If you'd like to work on this, please comment below and check CONTRIBUTING.md.

[sajeetharan]

@HereIsMuhammad can you take a look at this?

[HereIsMuhammad]

Hi @sajeetharan I'd like to work on this!

Before I start, I looked into the current data model and want to flag one thing:

Current state: The developer dataset (data/developers-sample.json) and the GitHub fetch script (scripts/fetch-github.js) don't currently store any activity timestamp - only aggregate totals (stars, commits, followers, etc). There's no "last active" field to build an online/offline state from yet.

Feasibility note: GitHub's API doesn't expose a literal "user is coding right now" signal. The closest reliable proxy is each user's contributionsCollection.contributionCalendar (already partially queried in fetch-github.js), which lets us derive the most recent day they had a contribution.

Since the dataset is refreshed periodically via the build pipeline (not a live stream), I'd propose tiers based on that, rather than a literal real-time state:

• Active today - most recent contribution day is today (as of last data refresh) -> bright/glowing marker
• Active this week - contribution within the last 7 days -> slightly dimmed marker
• Inactive - no contribution in the last 7 days -> static, muted marker

The "X developers coding right now" counter would then read as something like "X developers active today" to stay accurate about what the data actually represents.

Plan:

1. Extend fetch-github.js to pull contributionCalendar and compute a lastActiveAt date per developer
2. Add the derived activity tier to the dataset build step
3. Update Globe.jsx marker rendering for the three visual states (glow/dim/static)
4. Add the "Show only active developers" filter toggle
5. Add the live count indicator, worded to reflect the batch-refresh nature of the data

Let me know if this approach works for you, or if you'd prefer a different activity window (e.g. last 24h instead of "today", or last 14 days instead of a week) before I start implementation.

[sajeetharan]

@HereIsMuhammad Thanks for the thorough analysis , your breakdown of the data model gap and the tiered approach makes total sense.

I understand your concern about the lack of a real-time "online" signal from GitHub. However, I want to put this feature on hold for now. The main reason is that our data pipeline ([fetch-github.js) doesn't run frequently enough for the lastActiveAt field to stay meaningful — it would go stale almost immediately after a pipeline run.

I'm thinking through a design change where we decouple the activity check from the main pipeline entirely (e.g., a lightweight scheduled function that periodically checks GitHub activity for developers already in Cosmos DB, using Change Feed to propagate updates to the view). This would give us fresh activity state regardless of how often the full pipeline runs.

Let me work through this and I'll update here once I have a clearer design. Appreciate you jumping on this — the visual rendering work (marker states, filter toggle, count indicator) will still be needed once the data layer is sorted.

[HereIsMuhammad]

@sajeetharan Sounds good, thanks for the update! That decoupled scheduled-function + Change Feed approach makes sense given the staleness issue - agreed the activity data needs to be reliably fresh for this to actually feel "live."

I'll hold off on this one until the data layer design is settled. Happy to pick it back up for the visual rendering work (marker states, filter toggle, count indicator) whenever you're ready - just tag me here or on a new issue when it's time.

In the meantime, I'll look for another good first issue to work on.