Careers is eating my GitHub API rate limit

Question

Sometimes, when I make requests to the GitHub API I see this error:

{
  "message": "API rate limit exceeded for IonicaBizau.",
  "documentation_url": "https://developer.github.com/v3/#rate-limiting"
}

I am almost sure that this is because of the StackOverflow Careers thing which accessed my GitHub account today (probably this hour):

Last used on Jan 23, 2015

GitHub Education also accessed the account today, but it happened when I authorized it to get the student pack.

So, StackOverflow Careers and GitHub Education are the only applications that made GitHub API requests, but I authorized GitHub Education earlier today (not in the last hour).

Can you confirm that StackOverflow Careers makes 5000 requests a hour to the GitHub API? If so, why on the Earth are 5000 request per hour needed for SO Careers?

Answer 1

This should be fixed with our next push, sorry about that!

When you import a GitHub repo to your Careers profile, we try to make sure that you actually contributed to it by retrieving commits you authored. If the number of commits is too high, the GitHub API will paginate the response, including only a small number of commits per page. When trying to fetch all of them, we ended up inadvertently making lots of requests to the API.

Instead of trying to load all of your contributions, we are now only making one request: if the response is empty, we know you never contributed to that project. If it’s non-empty, you are considered a legit contributor, and there’s no need for us to look for further commits you authored.

Sorry about eating your API rate limit.