GitTrek: Live Status Detection for Open Source Issues
Check GitTrek to get live status of open‑source issues and avoid silent claiming.
Try GitTrek by searching for beginner‑friendly issues and observe the live status badges.
Summary
GitTrek addresses the silent claiming problem in open‑source issue discovery by leveraging GitHub’s GraphQL timelineItems to detect PR mentions and linked branches in real time.
It focuses on two event types: CROSS_REFERENCED_EVENT, which fires when an issue number is mentioned in a PR or commit, and CONNECTED_EVENT, which fires when a branch linked to the issue becomes a pull request.
The tool classifies issue status into four colors—Active PR, Someone started, Branch exists, and Safe to claim—based on the presence of open non‑draft PRs, draft PRs, or linked branches.
To keep the UI snappy, GitTrek performs 21 API calls for 20 issues and uses Promise.allSettled to hydrate badges in parallel, ensuring that a single failure does not block the entire dashboard.
The approach eliminates the 2‑day wasted time caused by static lists or periodic scrapes used by other tools like goodfirstissue.dev and up‑for‑grabs.net.
GitTrek’s code snippets demonstrate how to query timelineItems and handle the two event types, then map the results to status badges for instant visual feedback.
Key changes
- Uses GraphQL timelineItems to detect issue activity
- CROSS_REFERENCED_EVENT fires on PR or commit mentions
- CONNECTED_EVENT fires when a linked branch becomes a PR
- Classifies status into Active PR, Someone started, Branch exists, Safe to claim
- Hydrates badges with Promise.allSettled for non‑blocking UI
- Detects silent claiming in real time
- Provides color‑coded status badges for quick assessment