The SitePoint PHP blog has a new tutorial posted showing you how to use the data the GitHub API provides to find popular users, per language, in an area. His sample example is a simple Silex framework based application and uses the KNPLabs GitHub library to interface with the API.

The data you can get through the GitHub API V3 is mostly what you can see on the GitHub web interface, except you can use the data in your application to come to interesting conclusions. That is what we are going to do in this article. [...] Now, what if there was a web service in which we could specify a location and a language (e.g. PHP) and get a sorted list of contributors to open-source? [...] In our web service, we will have one endpoint (i.e. action, URL) that shows the most popular ten creators. The most popular creators are the people in a location who have the largest number of stargazers. For this, we will retrieve each person’s repositories and add up the number of times each one has been starred.

He steps you through getting a Homestead Improved VM up and running (via Vagrant) and a basic Silex application up and running inside. He then pulls in the KNPLabs GitHub library via Composer and sets up a new client in the default route (and grabs the public user data for a user). He then shows how to change it up and use the Search API and some special queries to locate users by a given location. He adds another class, a "StarGazerCalculator", that's given the users returned, filters out the forks in the list and calculates the total "stargazer" count for the user. He does the same with the "top creators" list and sets it up as a service provider, fetches the data and returns the results as a JSON document.