Why I built a link-in-bio just for developers

Every developer I know has the same problem: the proof that they're good at this is real, and it's scattered.

It's commits on GitHub. It's an answer on Stack Overflow someone upvoted. It's a Dev.to post that actually helped someone. It's a side project with three stars that took a weekend. None of that lives in one place, and none of it is what shows up when you hand someone a link.

What usually shows up instead is a resume PDF that's already a little out of date, or a portfolio site you built once and haven't touched since, or a generic link-in-bio page that treats a GitHub profile the same way it treats a Spotify playlist — as one more manual entry in a list.

The actual problem isn't a missing link. It's upkeep.

I don't think developers are missing a "link in bio" tool. Linktree and Bento already exist, and they're fine at what they do. The problem is that none of them understand what a developer actually has to show, so keeping a profile current means manually re-entering the same things you already did somewhere else — pasting in a new repo, writing a new blurb, updating a link every time something ships.

That's the part that actually doesn't get done. Not because developers don't care how they come across, but because the update is friction, and friction loses to everything else on a Tuesday.

So plaqo starts from GitHub, not from a blank page

A plaqo profile isn't something you fill out once. It syncs from the places the work already lives — GitHub repos and contributions, Dev.to and Medium posts, Stack Overflow reputation, LeetCode stats, and more. You still shape it — the theme, the layout, what you highlight — but the parts that go stale on every other tool are the parts that update themselves here.

The test I kept coming back to while building this: would the profile still be accurate if I didn't touch it for two months? On plaqo, it is. On the last portfolio site I built for myself, it very much was not.

Why the code is public, but not free to clone

plaqo ships under the Business Source License — the source is public and you're free to read it, self-host it, and modify it for your own use. What you can't do is stand up a competing hosted version of it. I'd rather have the code visible and the trust that comes with that than keep it closed, but I also built this to be a real product, not a reference implementation for someone else's SaaS.

If you want to see exactly how something works — how the GitHub sync pulls contribution data, how the theme builder generates styles — it's there to read. That felt like the right trade for a tool aimed at developers specifically, who are going to ask "how does this actually work" more than most audiences would.

Try the part that doesn't require an account

Before asking anyone to sign up, I wanted there to be something useful even if you never do. The GitHub Profile Grader checks a public GitHub profile — bio, a profile README, recent activity, consistency, language diversity — and tells you what's missing, for free, with no login. It deliberately doesn't score followers or stars; grading on popularity would just punish people earlier in their career, which is the opposite of the point.

If a green checkmark shows you something worth fixing, that's the whole product, in miniature: a profile that actually reflects the work, without babysitting it.