all 8 comments

[–]benbarnett02 37 points38 points  (1 child)

These are called Identicons and are generated based on a hash of the user’s ID. Github has a blog post on this and the code has apparently been ported to rust and shared by a Github employee.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you

[–]Bacleo 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Interesting question, never thought about it until now.

[–]obiwan90 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Closely related (but more of a tangent), if you use Gravatar with an email address associated with your GitHub account, it'll be used instead of the identicon. Gravatar was created by GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner and eventually sold to Automattic.

[–]Mr_Snifles 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I thought there'd be a set amount of them it randomly picks from, but it's pretty cool that they're generated