
Dear GitHub: Please let us sort our projects - oddshocks
http://oddshocks.com/dear-github-please-let-us-sort-our-projects/
======
jnbiche
Strongly agree. Now that Github is being used as a de facto CV, it's really
important for our Github page to show our strongest projects first.

If some silly project I contributed to 4 years ago pops up first on my Github
page, most potential clients and/or employers are not going to make the effort
to scroll through pages of projects to find the projects most representative
of my current abilities.

On the bright side, this exact phenomenon has led me to go back and clean up a
few projects of mine that became unexpectedly popular. Now they have
documentation and updates that I probably wouldn't have made otherwise
(although their popularity alone also propelled me to make these changes).

~~~
chimeracoder
> Strongly agree. Now that Github is being used as a de facto CV,

First off, I really dislike this practice to begin with.

That said, under this practice, the current approach discourages people from
forking others' repositories (I know at least one person who has a separate
account just for this, so it doesn't "clutter" his list of repositories).

It also discourages contributing to new projects with fewer stars. Currently,
my contribution to Github's linguist (1880 stars) shows up on my 5
"repositories contributed to". If I contribute to my friend's one-off project,
it may or may not push that off _and I have no way of knowing_ , since those
five aren't even ordered in any way that I can make sense of. (I have
experimented with this in the past, and the repository that seems to be bumped
when I make a new submission is arbitrary, as far as I can tell).

------
blatherard
I just experienced the other side of this problem yesterday. I was checking
out a job applicant who had a lot of repositories and I couldn't easily figure
out which ones really mattered. Fortunately, he also had his own portfolio
site. The github profile was effectively useless.

~~~
cldwalker
If you're curious what contributions a user has made to their forks, I wrote a
simple that breaks down # of commits per fork e.g. [http://github-
contributions.herokuapp.com/cldwalker](http://github-
contributions.herokuapp.com/cldwalker)

~~~
elwell
That's pretty cool, thanks!

------
patcon
Maybe open an issue here:
[https://github.com/isaacs/github](https://github.com/isaacs/github)

Visit this link after the one above to find a github easter egg :)
[https://github.com/contact](https://github.com/contact)

~~~
bnferguson
Haha, not intended to be an easter egg at all. That message happens for any
non-Organization-owned, non-private, non-owned-by-you repo.

eg hit [https://github.com/mbostock/d3](https://github.com/mbostock/d3) then
[https://github.com/contact](https://github.com/contact)

Just reads a bit funny in the case of
[https://github.com/isaacs/github](https://github.com/isaacs/github) :)

------
scribu
Yes, please!

I would also be happy with just being able to create groups on the
repositories tab. Nothing fancy, just being able to say: "Hey, these are my
old WordPress plugins; these are my esoteric projects etc."

------
yaddayadda
Another GitHub nuisance: I'm a huge fan of pinboard.in and use the Firefox
popup bookmarklet quite a bit but github repositories [1] won't let me
bookmark them with the bookmarklet. GitHub repositories are literally the only
pages I've found the I haven't been able to use the pinboard bookmarklet, and
it's been that way with every single GitHub repository I've tried to pinboard.

[1] Strangely github.io pages bookmark just fine.

~~~
conroy
The bookmarklet fails due to GitHub's content security policies[0], which
disable inline scripts. I'd suggest installing the Pinboard browser extension
to get around those limitations.

[0] [https://github.com/blog/1477-content-security-
policy](https://github.com/blog/1477-content-security-policy)

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jordigh
This is one thing that bugs me a lot about how centralised Github becomes: if
you want any changes, you have to resort to begging with blog posts.

~~~
sauravt
How else would you want it to be ?

~~~
fenollp
GitHub could put up a voting user-oriented website much like the now
discontinued Ubuntu Brainstorm.

I have plenty of ideas for them…

* allow symlinks in the gh-pages branch

* do not `chmod u+x` every text file in zip archives

* actually support `git-archive`

* make rebasing of PRs easier

* look for a contributor's code in a repo

* when looking at a file, have a link showing current PRs editing it

~~~
electrum
Symlinks work for gh-pages. We use it for linking to the current version of
the docs:

[https://github.com/facebook/presto/tree/gh-
pages/docs](https://github.com/facebook/presto/tree/gh-pages/docs)

[http://prestodb.io/docs/current/](http://prestodb.io/docs/current/)

~~~
fenollp
Hey electrum, There is a discussion on this matter over [1]. Other people and
I still cannot get symlinks to work on gh-pages. Do you have any idea why that
is? It could be because of a free vs. business GitHub account…

Cheers

[1]: [https://github.com/Sidnicious/gh-pages-symlink-
test/issues/4](https://github.com/Sidnicious/gh-pages-symlink-test/issues/4)

------
ozh
And tag them also. And also tag our gists.

~~~
jnbiche
tagged gists! I could actually start using them for reference, in lieu of (or
possibly in addition to) my current personal wiki.

------
randunel
He sounds like my project manager, when adding a new feature just by
mentioning it during a demo, and sees our faces:

"What I'm asking wouldn't be hard at all"

:))

Unless you're intimately involved with the project or a guru in similar
projects, you've got no idea whether any feature would be hard / simple, time-
consuming/interesting.

~~~
oddshocks
I didn't mean to devalue the challenge of implementing and testing a new
feature. All I'm saying is that it wouldn't require much problem solving. It'd
just be a sorted list, perhaps with the ability to reorder and resize items
with some JavaScript. The GitHub devs are obviously skilled coders, and have
many JavaScript ninjas among them.

~~~
randunel
Personally, I am under the same impression as yours. Adding a custom order
functionality should not be that difficult, even with all these types of repos
(forks, private, org, etc). I would benefit from such a feature, as would my
colleagues. But maybe there's a deeply nested technical debt that prevents
them from doing that atm.

I was just bringing up the similarity between your apparent devaluation of the
challenges a new feature brings, with my project manager's ability of adding
"sure, done by tomorrow" features during demos :D

------
cwalcott
If GitHub profiles really are becoming the "new resume", I think users are
need more control over them. Certainly sorting projects is a good start.

~~~
arebours
I think it would be awesome to be able to commit README for your user page. It
would resolve the sorting problem too - you could just list your projects the
way you like it (even with description for each of them).

------
pwelch
Another missing sorting option that blows my mind is sorting issue tags.

I find it hard to quickly search Issues tags when they are in no specific
order. I would settle for letting me drag them in an order I want rather than
order they were created.

------
rkuykendall-com
A lot of these solutions sound very complex. Sorting, tags, categories, grid,
trees...

How about just showing my repos that I starred at the top? Or if you want to
get slightly more complex, a "Feature" button similar to "Star."

~~~
catshirt
i have almost 40 repositories. many private (because i don't want them to
muddy up my Github image). a single boolean "featured" is terribly
insufficient. tagging would be fantastic.

------
AznHisoka
When I login to github, the repos I've "contributed" to (not even checkin
code, but comment on) are on top, while my own are below the fold. What gives?
I just wanna access my own repo.

------
pointpointclick
In the last paragraph OP writes "I implore you to allow us to sort our own
repos. I know that there are mixed feelings about Windows 8's tile layout for
their start menu, but I think that's the sort of thing that we need for
project sorting."

Just like they've been grouping projects on their explore pages --
[https://github.com/explore](https://github.com/explore) \-- I would love to
see this functionality availble to users to sort repos on their own profile
pages as well.

------
VaedaStrike
This thought literally just occurred to me yesterday when I was looking at the
famo.us repo.

what would be cool would be if each one could create their own views/rankings
of anyone's public repo.

------
hardwaresofton
A note on the dot-files... would you consider putting your dot
files/configration files in a project like mine:

[http://configr.io](http://configr.io)

The project is pretty old, but I started it with the assumption that maybe dot
files (that are OK being in the public domain) shouldn't be on github in the
first place.

I never did get github integration working, and the site is very basic, but I
would love some opinions on it

------
bkurtz13
With more and more companies using your GitHub page as a resume of sorts, this
kind of customization is becoming a necessary requirement.

------
j2kun
Maybe my repos are a bit more popular (they're connected to a blog I write),
but I've noticed that my best repos get pushed to the top by how often
_others_ star them.

Still, couldn't you use the username.github.io to feature your repos? Or at
least have a prominent link from a github profile to that page?

------
dfc
And please let me sort by mtime when viewing files/dirs in the "tree view
mode."

~~~
malkia
Especially for projects that use some form of "git submodule" and their
modules appear top-level in the github page (or other sites for that matter)

~~~
dfc
Sorting by date is a nice way to see what is being worked on and what has not
been touched in a while. Especially for projects that have a hundreds of
plugins/translators/widgets in individual files. There is not even an easy way
to do it on the command line, so those relative dates on the right hand column
just taunt me .

------
kjjw
So desperately want a way to sort repos other than by most recent commit time.
I think I'd give a toe for this.

Needs to be a sort selected for others to view when they look at my or my
organisations' repo list.

------
Dorian-Marie
Or you can also have a website where you do that

~~~
oddshocks
As other folks have mentioned, the issue is that many people looking to hire
just look at your GitHub page and your repo list.

~~~
Dorian-Marie
As someone you hires too, I do that, but also look at the website if there is
any.

------
kurtfunai
I completely agree with this. It has bothered me for a long time that I cannot
sort my own projects by what I think is important.

------
catshirt
if you only have 1 repository with more than 10 stars, sorting your work seems
a like a premature optimization.

~~~
andrewguenther
Employers aren't going to judge a project based on how many stars it has,
that's the exact issue this is trying to address. One of the projects I am
most proud of has no stars. Popularity has little bearing on how well designed
or elegant a piece of code it.

~~~
catshirt
i'll agree that in order for Github to become the personal CV (and it
should!), it needs to account for all use cases (ie. profiles without any
popular repositories).

but, as a hiring manager, i don't use Github as a measure for competence. i
use Github as a measure for involvement in the open source community
(competence usually comes incidentally).

having 30 projects with 0 stars does not really do anything for me that a
single code sample through email could not. no matter how you categorize them.

------
bmoresbest55
Yes! GitHub, over here! We really want this! Please! ... And thank you!

------
pearjuice
Completely unrelated, but I couldn't stop laughing when I finished reading the
article and saw "David Gay" as the post author at the bottom. Every time he
introduces himself, reactions might range from hilarity to anger.

Good for him to live with the pride of his ancestors and not changing his last
name. Probably why the domain is oddshocks.com instead of his full name; I see
it easily ending up on the wrong side of a NSFW-filter.

~~~
oddshocks
While I understand why folks voted this down, but it made me laugh. :) I never
thought about the NSFW filter, but I believe domains that fit my full name
were taken when I registered the domain.

When I was a little kid, my last name was a problem because of the times I
grew up in, but nowadays it only leads to hilarity. Plus it's short and easy
to spell. ;)

