thegitcity.com

A developer profile is the public record of a GitHub account: its repositories, contribution history, and activity over time. Git City (thegitcity.com) is a third-party visualization that turns those profiles into buildings in a shared 3D pixel-art city, so you can fly through and discover developers spatially. It is not an official GitHub product, and the city reflects only what GitHub exposes publicly — not code quality, skill, or hiring suitability.

What a developer profile actually contains

On GitHub, a profile is assembled from a few data types:

• Repositories — public (and, to you, private) projects, each with its own language mix, stars, and history.
• Contributions — commits, pull requests, issues, and reviews, aggregated into the contribution graph.
• Activity — when and how often the account works, including streaks and gaps.
• Identity layer — username, avatar, bio, followers, and pinned repositories.

These are the raw signals any profile visualization has to work from. Git City's own description frames the result simply: "Explore GitHub users as buildings in a 3D pixel art city."

How Git City maps profiles to a city

The site presents "a global city of GitHub developers" and invites you to "find yourself." The mapping works at the level of the profile as a whole:

The page shows a search field with a "Search ▶" control and a small set of scene options (an "Intro" view and a "Graphics" setting marked HIGH), plus a live-activity indicator. What the visualization does not do is grade developers: a taller or more central building should be read as a visual placement, not a ranking of ability. Treat the city as a discovery and browsing layer over public GitHub data.

Finding your own profile in the city

1. Open thegitcity.com in a browser. The city scene loads with the search control visible.
2. Enter your GitHub username in the search field and submit with the search button.
3. Expect the view to move to your building — your profile rendered as a structure within the city.
4. Fly around to compare neighboring buildings and discover other developers.
5. Adjust the Graphics setting if the scene runs poorly; the page exposes a HIGH option, so a lower setting is the place to look if performance drops.

A common snag: if your building looks sparse or you can't find yourself, check that your GitHub activity is public. Private contributions and private repositories won't surface in a third-party view.

What the visualization does and doesn't tell you

It does give you a fast, memorable way to see that a developer exists in the open-source landscape, to browse adjacent developers, and to get a spatial feel for a community.

It doesn't replace reading a profile. Stars, commit cadence, and repository contents still carry the substance; the city is an entry point, not an evaluation. For a concrete use case: if you're assembling a shortlist of open-source contributors to follow, use the city to stumble onto names, then open each GitHub profile to check repositories and contribution history before deciding.

Git City is built by an independent developer (@samuelrizzondev, per the site) and is a visualization layer, not a GitHub feature — so don't expect it to show anything GitHub itself keeps private.

A 3D GitHub city is a visualization that turns GitHub users into buildings inside a navigable pixel-art world. Git City (thegitcity.com) is one example: it describes itself as "a global city of GitHub developers" where you can "find yourself" and "fly through the city and discover developers." It is an exploration layer over developer profiles and contributions, not a replacement for GitHub itself. Use it when you want a spatial, visual way to browse developers or locate your own place in the city; keep using GitHub for actual code, issues, and collaboration.

How developers become buildings

The core mechanism is a mapping from developer identity to a place in the city:

• One user, one building. Each GitHub user appears as a building in the 3D pixel-art city, so the skyline is a population of developers rather than a single project.
• The city is global. The site frames it as a worldwide city of GitHub developers, so buildings represent people across the platform rather than one organization.
• Pixel-art style. The visual language is deliberately game-like, which makes scanning and flying through the city feel like exploration rather than reading a directory.

The site's own description is the reliable source for this mapping: "Explore GitHub users as buildings in a 3D pixel art city." What the page evidence does not specify is the exact formula for building height, size, or placement, so treat any claim that a taller building equals a precise contribution count as unconfirmed unless the site states it.

What data drives the visualization

The site's keywords point to the inputs it works with: developer profiles, contributions, and open-source activity. In practice, that means the city is built from public-facing GitHub signals — who the developer is and what their activity looks like — rendered as architecture instead of a profile card.

A useful way to think about it: GitHub stores the record; the 3D city re-renders that record as a place. For example, if you want to see how a group of open-source maintainers looks as a neighborhood, the city view gives you that at a glance, while GitHub gives you the commits, pull requests, and discussions behind it.

Finding yourself and exploring others

The page evidence shows a search control ("Search") and a "Find yourself" prompt, which tells you the intended entry point: look up a GitHub user and locate their building.

1. Open thegitcity.com.
2. Use the search field to look up a GitHub username.
3. Navigate or fly through the city to reach the matching building.
4. Continue exploring nearby buildings to discover other developers.

The page also shows interface elements like a live/sleeping city indicator, a district-style label ("Emerald"), a view counter ("1 / 4"), and a graphics quality setting ("Graphics HIGH"). These are presentation controls for the city experience — they affect how the city looks and performs, not your GitHub data.

What the city view does and does not show

The city is a discovery and visualization tool. For anything that requires the underlying repository data — reviewing a contribution history in detail, contacting a maintainer, or contributing to a project — go to the developer's GitHub profile.

When a 3D GitHub city is worth using

It fits best when the question is "who is out there and how do they cluster visually?" rather than "what exactly did this person commit?" If you are curating a list of open-source developers to follow, showing a friend what the GitHub population looks like as a skyline, or just want to find your own building, the city view is a fast, memorable way in. If you need verifiable contribution numbers or project-level detail, start from GitHub and use the city as a companion view.

GitHub is a web platform for hosting Git repositories and collaborating on code. For open-source projects like mailcow, it serves as the place where source code lives, releases are published, bugs are reported, and contributions are reviewed. You can use GitHub without writing any code — browsing a project's repository, reading its changelog, or filing a bug report are all legitimate uses. The one thing to keep straight up front: Git is the version-control tool that tracks changes to files, while GitHub is a hosting and collaboration service built around Git. You can use Git without GitHub, and GitHub hosts projects that use Git.

The core concepts you'll actually encounter

A repository's history is a chain of commits. Branches let people work on changes without disturbing the main line. When a change is ready, it's proposed as a pull request, reviewed, and merged. Issues are the separate track for problems and discussion — they aren't code, but they often drive it.

Finding a project's source, releases, and changelog

For a project like mailcow, the repository is the authoritative source for what's in a given version. A practical path:

1. Open the project's repository page. The file listing and README are the front door — the README usually states what the project is and how to install it.
2. Check the Releases section (often a link in the sidebar) to see tagged versions. Release notes typically list component version bumps and security fixes. mailcow's own blog, for example, publishes entries such as "Mootember 2026 | Unbound 1.26.1, SOGo 5.12.11 & Redis 7.4.11" and "Mooly 2026 | Postfix 3.10.12, Rspamd 4.1.0 & Nginx 1.30.3," each tied to a dated update release.
3. Look for a CHANGELOG file or a changelog link. This is where you confirm exactly which component versions and fixes landed in a release.
4. Use the commits view when you need to know when something changed, not just that it changed.

This matters when you're deciding whether to upgrade. A release note that says it "addresses several security-related issues" and "strongly recommend[s] updating" is a different signal than a routine dependency bump.

Reporting a bug or contributing a change

The workflow is the same across most projects:

• Before filing an issue, search existing issues. Duplicates get closed, and the answer may already be there.
• When filing, include what you did, what you expected, and what happened — plus version numbers. For a Docker-based project, that means the image or release version and relevant logs.
• To contribute code, the usual path is: fork the repository, create a branch, make commits, push, then open a pull request against the upstream project. Maintainers review, request changes, and merge.

You don't need commit access to any of this. Forking and pull requests exist precisely so outside contributors can propose changes without direct write access to the main repository.

GitHub vs. Git, in one example

Say you want to fix a typo in a project's documentation. Git, running on your machine, records your edit as a commit and tracks the branch you made it on. GitHub is where you push that branch and open a pull request so the maintainers can see and merge it. Git did the version tracking; GitHub did the hosting and the collaboration. If you only ever browse a project's releases or read its issues, you're using GitHub and never touching Git directly — which is fine.

Where this leaves you

If your goal is to use a project like mailcow, you mainly need the Releases and changelog views to pick and verify a version. If your goal is to report or fix something, you need issues and pull requests. And if you're trying to understand what changed between two versions, commits and release notes are the record — not the marketing page.

Piskel is a free, open-source, browser-based editor for pixel art and animated sprites — you can design characters, animations, and tiles right in your browser, then export them as animated GIFs or spritesheet PNG/ZIP files. It works best in a desktop browser in landscape orientation, so if you're on a phone or a narrow window, expect a cramped workspace. The workflow below covers starting a sprite, drawing, animating frame by frame, and exporting.

Getting started

Open piskelapp.com and choose one of two paths:

• Start from scratch — create a blank sprite at a size you pick (small canvases like 32×32 or 64×64 are typical for characters and tiles).
• Try an example — the site's Sprite examples gallery includes characters, Gameboy retro graphics, layered backgrounds, and tilesets contributed by users such as CaptainBrosset, Ansimuz, Buch, and Surt. Opening one is the fastest way to see how frames, layers, and palettes are organized before you build your own.

If you're working with children or in a classroom, Piskel for Kids is a child-friendly version of the same editor, designed to be safe and distraction-free.

Drawing your pixel art

The editor gives you the standard pixel-art toolset: a pencil for single pixels, an eraser, fill, color picker, and shape/line tools, plus a color palette you can adjust as you work. Because everything is grid-based, zoom in before you draw — at small canvas sizes each pixel is a deliberate decision, and zooming keeps you from accidentally painting the wrong cell.

A practical order of work:

1. Set your canvas size first. Changing it later means redrawing or rescaling.
2. Block in the silhouette with a solid color.
3. Add shading and highlights with a limited palette (3–5 colors per material reads cleanly).
4. Clean up stray pixels with the eraser at high zoom.

Animating frame by frame

Piskel's timeline sits below the canvas. Each frame is a still image; the animation plays by cycling through them.

• Add frames to build a sequence — for a walk cycle, that usually means 4–8 frames.
• Duplicate a frame and edit only what changes, which keeps motion consistent between frames.
• Use layers to separate elements (for example, a character layer and a background layer) so you can edit one without disturbing the other.
• Check the live preview — Piskel shows a real-time preview of your animation as you draw, so you can judge timing without exporting.
• Adjust frame delay on the fly to speed up or slow down playback until the motion feels right.

Exporting your work

Piskel supports several export modes, and the right one depends on what you're doing next:

For game development, the spritesheet export is usually what you want — engines typically expect a single image containing every frame rather than a GIF.

Offline and desktop options

If you need to work without an internet connection, Piskel offers free desktop and offline applications for Windows, OSX, and Linux via its download page. The full source code is also open-source and available on GitHub at github.com/piskelapp/piskel, so you can inspect it, self-host it, or contribute.

Common snags

• Mobile or portrait orientation — the editor warns that it's best used in a desktop browser in landscape orientation. You can open it anyway, but the layout will be tight.
• Canvas size regret — pick your dimensions before drawing; resizing mid-project is the most common source of rework.
• Choppy animation — if motion looks jerky, the fix is usually more frames or a shorter frame delay, not more detail in each frame.

Open source means the software's source code is publicly available, so anyone can inspect, modify, and redistribute it. Zen Cart, the platform running this reptile supply store, is open-source e-commerce software: the store owner can read and change the code, and no license fee is paid to a vendor. That matters to a small shop because it removes per-sale or monthly software fees and allows deep customization — but it also means the owner (or a developer they hire) handles hosting, updates, and security. Note that "open source" here describes the store software, not the reptile foods and supplements sold on it.

Open source in plain terms

Proprietary store platforms typically charge a subscription or a percentage of sales and keep their code closed. Open-source platforms publish the code under a license that permits use and modification. In practice, for a store like this one:

• No license fee. You pay for hosting and your own time, not for permission to run the software.
• Full access to the code. Layouts, checkout flow, and product pages can be changed beyond what a theme editor allows.
• Community development. Fixes and add-ons come from contributors and other store owners, not only from one company.

What it looks like on this store

The page evidence shows a typical Zen Cart storefront: category navigation (Bee Pollen, Cat Grass, Chia Seeds, Dandelion, Sprouting Seeds, Supplements), an "All Products" listing, reviews, and an information block with About Us, Shipping & Returns, Privacy Notice, Conditions of Use, Order Status, Site Map, Gift Certificate FAQ, and Discount Coupons. That structure — categories, reviews, coupons, gift certificates, order status — is what the platform provides out of the box. The store also publishes care guides (Russian Tortoise Care, Box Turtle Care, Redfoot Tortoise Care) and growing instructions, which are content pages the owner added rather than built-in store features.

Benefits for a small pet supply shop

• Cost control. No platform subscription means a low fixed cost that doesn't scale with order volume.
• Custom catalog logic. A shop selling seeds, dried weeds, and supplements by weight can adjust product options, units, and shipping rules directly in the code.
• Content and commerce in one place. Care guides and growing instructions sit alongside the catalog, which supports the store's stated role of helping customers find foods for herbivore reptiles.
• No vendor lock-in on data. You can export and migrate your catalog if you decide to move.

Trade-offs to plan for

Deciding whether it fits your store

Choose an open-source cart like Zen Cart if you want no license fees, need code-level customization, and have either technical skills or a developer you can call. Choose a hosted subscription platform instead if you'd rather not manage hosting, patches, and upgrades, and you're comfortable paying monthly for that convenience. A middle path works for many small shops: run the open-source cart on managed hosting that handles server updates, and keep a developer on retainer for store-level changes.

If you're evaluating this specific store as a model, the useful signal is that a niche reptile supply shop can run a full catalog, reviews, coupons, and care content on open-source software without a platform fee — the cost shifts from subscriptions to maintenance.