Who has a solid Github portfolio?
It happened to me a few times that a recruiter would refer to my Github profile so it seems to be a big deal for them.
And I was just wondering whether other developers actively maintain their accounts.
So how great is your Github profile?
Update: Thanks to everyone for your replies! It was insightful to know your view on the topic. 🙏
Some of the best programmers I know don't have github accounts, as they spend all their time building software that they can't or don't want to share publicly. I don't know when this idea of needing to have a github account with spectacular repos started, but it honestly isn't a real indication of how good some is at their job.
I wouldn't call my profile https://github.com/jcolag solid, because I just sort of work on whatever I want whenever I want instead of treating it like a portfolio of things that would make it clear to a hiring manager why they should hire me, but except for the months last year when I was pretty thoroughly burned out, I try to commit something every day (and usually no more than three "somethings") to keep myself looking for new things to work on.
Keeping my blog posts in a repository obviously helps with the "something daily" aspect, these days.
Except for the time I pushed out a short (less than a hundred lines) program in Scala and a hedge fund recruiter called that afternoon, though, I haven't the foggiest idea if any of that activity is useful beyond my own motivation and having backups of my work.
What happened in the period June to November? just wondering, but nice work
For me, it looks like you spend daily amounts of dev, which makes sense.
I think that was a clear sign that I was burning out at the day job and should have been either asking for more support at the office (I shouldn't give too many details, there...) or looking for something new. I didn't, so I was coming home with no interest in my other projects.
On the bright side, it's good to know that I could probably just write a program to scrape my profile and tell me that I'm not feeling quite right...
Oh damn sorry, didn't mean to be rude.
BEen there as well and to be honest it's the worse feeling ever not doing what you initially loved so much at home.
Still have days where I just don't want a computer.
Oh, definitely no problem, there. If we don't talk about these issues, it'll continue to be uncomfortable to talk about them and it'll keep happening.
I can't speak for how non-technical recruiters perceive Github (do they even understand what it is really?), but as a CTO I can say that when evaluating applicants it helps if they have a Github page or personal website/blog.
From somebody's Github you can guage things about that person - you can see what their interests are, see how they approach code writing, the quality of their written English (in the readme's), whether they write unit-test, whether they have any devops skills and whether they see things through to the completion or is their account a graveyard of incomplete projects.
Of course, if someone does not have a Github account or if their account is clearly not a bragging 'portfolio' but merely a tool to occasionally make 1-line patches to some open-source repo, then I do not hold it against them. It simply means I need to lean more heavily on our technical and code-test interviewing stages to guage this individual.
A couple of years ago I made a conscious decision to spruce up my Github to be more appealing. Is it "solid" I couldn't say, but it's better than it was!
Not sure what would be a solid portfolio on Github, could you elaborate more on that?
I deploy daily for my work and personal blog, so no fear my commits are off haha.
As for links: https://github.com/rebelchris
I would personally think for a dev something like Codepen would be more interesting?
https://codepen.io/rebelchris
I was actually curious about how people see a solid Github account. I don't really have a good definition myself.
I'm a marketer but I guess I could speak for Rejah since he's not active on IH. He's fairly active on GitHub and I believe he has a solid profile.