Woman Posts Boyfriend Request on GitHub, Requires Access to His Server

Ms. Higashi (Photo: GitHub)

If you’re not having much luck with traditional dating sites and you’re not a hardcore Star Trek fan, what’s a smart single gal to do? If you’re Noriko Higashi, a programmer at a social gaming company, you post a request for a boyfriend on the social coding platform GitHub. Gotta play to your target audience, right?

Ms. Higashi, a 30-something software engineer living in Tokyo, posted the file “boyfriend_require” to GitHub with the hope that she might be able to find someone who shares her goals and interests. Naturally, as an exacting programmer, she’s listed a fair number of standards that she hopes a potential mate can live up to, a few of which are listed below.

1. Someone who has at least 5 friends from elementary school, high school, or university that they still keep in contact with.
2. Someone who has professional relationships, which have lasted at least one year, with over 20 people (this includes relationships on Facebook).
3. Someone who can speak with his neighbors (regardless of their age or gender) for at least 30 minutes.
4. Someone who enjoys interacting with young children.
5. Someone who likes eating vegetables and natto.
6. Someone who does not become jealous of rich, beautiful or famous people.
7. Someone who does not compare himself to others, gloating or feeling a general sense of superiority.
8. Someone who can tolerate social gaming companies like Zynga, GREE, or Mobage.
9. Someone who prefers Mac/Linux to Windows.
10. Someone who does not compare me to my mother.
11. Someone who sympathizes with the work of Peter Drucker and who has adopted some of his “seven principles”.
12. Someone who plays at most only 1 hour of videogames a day, or at most only 30 minutes of TV.

For interested engineers, there are additional caveats:

1. Someone who writes beautiful code–it makes me cry tears of joy. (Required)
2. Someone who maintains their own server (Required, Linux preferred)
3. Someone who will let me help them maintain their own server (Required)
4. Someone with public repos on Github (Required)

Despite the specification that interested partners meet at least 28/30 of her requirements, Ms. Higashi’s post has inspired a fair number of responses. (We’ve reached out to her to ask if she’s managed to meet any promising mates due to the post.)

It seems her request may have a few bugs, though. One user filed a pull request to translate the doc into Chinese. Under “issues” with the repo, a number of potential suitors noted Ms. Higashi’s lack of profile photo. When she denied the request, one user replied, “wooo~~~~this bug gets no fixes?!”

Another user pointed out that some of her preferences may fundamentally conflict: