Hello World, from Geshwho!

28 Jul 2020 - Mangesh Tamhankar

Hello World! Welcome to my first blog post.

I’ve had a Github account since December 3rd, 2014. How do I know this? Well, It took me a moment to figure this out. I did a quick Google search on how to determine the created_at property for a Github user. The first article I found suggested that this isn’t possible, but that the best estimate is to use repositories. The oldest repo in my account is titled Sandbox, and it contains a single file (README.md) with a single word in it (“Sandbox”). It has a single commit made on December 3rd 2014. This seemed like a reasonable estimate, so I didn’t think much more of it. I should probably archive or delete this repo 🤔.

The next day I decided to look through the Github API docs myself. It turns out that it is quite simple to find the this information. Here’s the command:

curl https://api.github.com/users/geshwho

And the response:

{
  "login": "geshwho",
  "id": 10064507,
  "node_id": "MDQ6VXNlcjEwMDY0NTA3",
  "avatar_url": "https://avatars0.githubusercontent.com/u/10064507?v=4",
  "gravatar_id": "",
  "url": "https://api.github.com/users/geshwho",
  "html_url": "https://github.com/geshwho",
  "followers_url": "https://api.github.com/users/geshwho/followers",
  "following_url": "https://api.github.com/users/geshwho/following{/other_user}",
  "gists_url": "https://api.github.com/users/geshwho/gists{/gist_id}",
  "starred_url": "https://api.github.com/users/geshwho/starred{/owner}{/repo}",
  "subscriptions_url": "https://api.github.com/users/geshwho/subscriptions",
  "organizations_url": "https://api.github.com/users/geshwho/orgs",
  "repos_url": "https://api.github.com/users/geshwho/repos",
  "events_url": "https://api.github.com/users/geshwho/events{/privacy}",
  "received_events_url": "https://api.github.com/users/geshwho/received_events",
  "type": "User",
  "site_admin": false,
  "name": "Mangesh Tamhankar",
  "company": "Gusto",
  "blog": "",
  "location": "New York, NY",
  "email": null,
  "hireable": null,
  "bio": "Software Engineer at @Gusto\r\nPreviously @vhx (@vimeo), @idatainc",
  "twitter_username": null,
  "public_repos": 18,
  "public_gists": 0,
  "followers": 3,
  "following": 2,
  "created_at": "2014-12-03T17:40:00Z",
  "updated_at": "2020-07-26T19:21:54Z"
}

In my case, it appears that the age of my oldest repository was a great indicator.

Why am I telling you all of this? For the longest time, my Github username has been mtamhankar1. I’ve never quite been in love with this username. Where did the “1” come from? Couldn’t tell you… At least as of writing this, mtamhankar is available. Why didn’t I pick that? Who knows… but now I know that it stuck around for over 5 and a half years.

On May 15th 2020, on an impulse, I checked if the domain name geshwho.com was available. It was. I immediately purchased the domain, and updated my github handle to geshwho. This had been my Instagram handle for months and I never considered it as a Github username, but something just clicked on that day. And so this website was born. I still wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted to do with the domain, but it didn’t matter. It’s mine now 😛.

A quick shoutout to my wife for designing most of this website. I’m sure there are several things in the design that I’ve missed, but I’ll get there. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.