Today I was sending a client some 404 Error pages for reference (at the moment their site defaults to the standard Rails 7 error page). GitHub has for years had an excellent 404 page (likely something we all will be encountering a lot more in light of recent events); so of course I wanted to reference that. The first thing that popped into my head was “blahblahblah” ie github.com/blahblahblah: unlikely to return anything, I thought. Incorrect: fair enough, GitHub’s simple URL scheme resolves the page path to any existing account.
Turns out blahblahblah is a GitHub user. They Joined in November 2008 and, from what I could tell never made any contributions. So I moved to the next logical path: blahblahblahblah while three “blah"s is a common English expression four is not. Turns out blahblahblahblah joined GitHub in 2010 and has made no contributions since.
So I tried, 5, 6, 7 iterations of “blah”, I began to worry that this was some sort of bot that was just joining GitHub with the next available number of “blah”.
The last user is: blahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblah which is 36 characters, 3 less than GitHub’s username limit of 39 characters. Sadly we will never know what could have been if there was no restriction on username lengths.