fuckup #1: the github ban april 1st, 2026 / piérre reimertz / no this is not an april fools joke this is the first in what i hope becomes a series about all the fuckups i've made over the years. the kind of mistakes you only make when you're excited enough to ship something without thinking it through. here's to tinkering irresponsibly. --- It was snowy day in late 2016, I was a young naive developer, addicted to all the creativity that lived on Github. But I always found it hard to know where to look. There were no real onboarding or trending repos I think.. Github didn't really introduce these new developers to all the fun that lived on the platform. So what if I create a repo with some helpful information that a new Github user might find helpful? I created a somewhat questionable repo and deployed it to: reimertz/welcome-to-github But now to the next problem - how would people find this repo? After some thinking I realized that I can just mention people in a Github issue so they get notified about the repo. Wait a minute, what if I just ping all new users so they get a welcome message? Such a good idea! I somehow needed to automate this and find new users, I also needed to find their usernames. After some more tinkering, I realized that all account ids were numerical, but more importantly, also incremental! I curl'd Github API with different user ids until I reached a number that did not return any user. After some more tweaking, I had a script that kept track of the next id that would be used when a user signed up. Eureka! All that was left was to resolve user id to username and then wrap this in a cron job that found and pinged all these new users in my Github issues. After a day of testing, I deployed the cron job on Nov 22, 2016 at 8:02 AM PST. I was really excited to see the first automated issue created with 15 users pinged, then another one, and then a third. It's working! But after just 1 minute, at 8:03 AM PST - I started to notice the CRON job failing. I went to Github and refreshed the page - seems I was logged out? I try and log in and notice a message "This account has been banned. If you think this is a mistake - reach out to Github support". Banned? Why?! ... This is when it all sinks in and I realize WTF I have just done. Like I was spamming every new user with some random stuff in a Github repo - how stupid can I be?! I had been so focused and excited about the motivation behind the idea that I didn't realize the consequences of it and how it would look like from Github's POV.. My Github account was my single source of income and also hosted all my personal projects, github pages, work... I truly panicked and reached out to Github support with my sincere apology realizing how stupid I had been. No response. A couple of more days, no response. I reached out again, further explaining my own stupidity begging for another chance. No response. I think it took 3 weeks before I got my account back again. Whenever I think back to that time, it's a mixed bag of embarrassment, relief and excitement at the same time. It truly was the time of tinkering - the web was a creative outlet for a lot of people, and I hope the person on the other side looked at the web the same way, and therefore gave me my account back. I am truly thankful for whoever decided to revoke my ban over at Github and I learnt a valuable lesson - tinker with responsibility! ps. today github has a list users endpoint with a since parameter that does exactly what i hacked together. pps. you can still find the github issues from this experiment, but usernames were manually removed by github. 😅 ← back home