Leaping into the World of APIs and Data

I am taking a flying leap and creating an entry for GitHub's 3rd Annual Data Challenge. My topic: The Six Degrees of Baconjs. Much like the movie-buff parlor game, the premise is simple: in six degrees or fewer, you can connect every user on GitHub (users who have at least one contributions/contributor outside of their own personal repos) with any other.

I have never attempted anything like this before. From the 10,000 feet view, given an input of a user, I will need to query for a list of all contributors to the Baconjs project and work backwards through each of their other repos to find the next degree's list of users. It's going to be recursive and strange but lots of fun!  I'm starting my studies of the first step with the GitHub API docs and the terrific tutorials on Codecademy. They even have one specifically on the GitHub API!

Wish me luck! I'm going to need it!