
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.
- Someone who has at least 5 friends from elementary school, high school, or university that they still keep in contact with.
- Someone who has professional relationships, which have lasted at least one year, with over 20 people (this includes relationships on Facebook).
- Someone who can speak with his neighbors (regardless of their age or gender) for at least 30 minutes.
- Someone who enjoys interacting with young children.
- Someone who likes eating vegetables and natto.
- Someone who does not become jealous of rich, beautiful or famous people.
- Someone who does not compare himself to others, gloating or feeling a general sense of superiority.
- Someone who can tolerate social gaming companies like Zynga, GREE, or Mobage.
- Someone who prefers Mac/Linux to Windows.
- Someone who does not compare me to my mother.
- Someone who sympathizes with the work of Peter Drucker and who has adopted some of his “seven principles”.
- 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:
- Someone who writes beautiful code–it makes me cry tears of joy. (Required)
- Someone who maintains their own server (Required, Linux preferred)
- Someone who will let me help them maintain their own server (Required)
- 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:
Preference 12;
Someone who does not compare himself to others, gloating or feeling a general sense of superiority.
directly conflicts with preference 15;
Someone who prefers Mac/Linux to Windows.
Not sure if these can be resolved.
Duly noted, but it’s still the most practical checklist we’ve seen by far.
(h/t Reddit)