
How I Organize My GitHub Repositories - aicioara
https://andreicioara.com/how-i-organize-my-github-repositories-ce877db2e8b6
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prepend
This is nice that op gets value. But github has a search feature. Google
searches pretty well. I rarely browse user accounts and if someone looked at
my account and cared because I had forked stuff, then I consider it a bonus
that they exclude me from their job search.

There ar different philosphies to githubbing, the mistake is only when you
project your own onto perceiving another’s.

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JoshTriplett
I would love to see folders available beneath users and organizations. When a
company puts repositories underneath github.com/companyname they all go in one
giant pile; subfolders would allow organizing components of projects into
folders.

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ocdtrekkie
I would be kind of worried that a project under an organization may not be
seen as "my project" when someone like a recruiter was looking at my profile.

I am really excited by what [https://ghuser.io](https://ghuser.io) is working
on, and really hope GitHub takes more inspiration from them on how to arrange
a profile, as it orders projects (whether mine, someone else's, or an
organization's) by a score calculated based on the popularity of a project and
how much you've contributed to it personally.

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michaelmior
> I only keep the most important projects on my profile page. Projects which I
> want others users to find and read.

It seems like the whole point of the OP's organization scheme is so that only
repositories which aren't in an organization are readily visible.

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meagher
Cool to see.

I do something similar. My main account is @tmm
([https://github.com/tmm](https://github.com/tmm)) and my deprecated projects
are in an org @tmm-archive ([https://github.com/tmm](https://github.com/tmm)).
Also put my data science university work in an org @tmm-ms
([https://github.com/tmm-ms](https://github.com/tmm-ms)).

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ken
> Fourth, another fork, but this time nothing has been updated for over a
> year. I guess the user pressed fork by mistake?

A guess: they submitted a PR, and upstream never got around to merging it. My
understanding is that the PR points to the fork, so if I delete my fork, the
PR dies (or loses its content). Is that true?

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uranusjr
It is true. Another common case I see is people using fork as a way to
snapshot stuff they depend on “just in case” (since forks don’t go away if the
original is deleted or overwritten). I don’t do it, but it’s quite common.
(source: I asked people why they fork my repo but never sent a PR)

My stance to this opinion is similar to many others here: this is all good if
it works for the author, but please don’t project your idea of a “good” GitHub
profile onto other people.

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bryanrasmussen
I fork without intending to PR.

Reasons:

1\. I intend to build something that requires the repository in question, but
I think I might have to extend the code in the repository itself.

2\. I intend to build something that requires the repository in question but I
feel more comfortable having a version of the code under my control as it will
be quite central. (the snapshot)

on edit: formatting fix

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chiefalchemist
> "Group repositories together using Organizations"

I've done this in the past. But then decided GitLab's ability to nest groups
(i.e., have a hierarchy) made more sense. When I made the switch, GL had free
private repos as well.

Sure GH is bigger. But GL was / is a better tool for my needs.

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paulirish
Occasionally I use [https://github.com/denis-sokolov/remove-github-
forks](https://github.com/denis-sokolov/remove-github-forks) to remove all the
forks I've created that no longer need to exist.

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Kagerjay
I don't see the value in having so many organizations. This makes searching
things harder. Github has search based features for finding repos you've made.
If you have an organization seperating out these, it's no longer a one click
search. I use github to search through my old codebases to extract useful code
snippets from courses.

You can pin 6 repos on your profile. If you want someone to see those
projects, pin it up there. It shows where the repo originated from

If you want to put all your tutorial code together, copy the end results into
a /sandbox folder in github, and document the README to summarize how the repo
is organized.

Projects that have no relevance / tutorials should just be kept private, you
could summarize courses you've done elsewhere. Sometimes I have exposed keys
on there that I hadn't set an `env` variable, keeping things private is a good
practice against bots

I tend to fork a lot of repos without intending to push a PR, mostly so I can
understand how that codebase works, and add my own notations to it. Also, it's
to keep a backup for projects I work through other organizations, there's a
chance that repo might be deleted down the road. You can always `git pull
upstream` at anypoint and grab the latest changes

If you want to show opensource projects you work on → pin it to your account,
notate it elsewhere (e.g. portfolio page), and be on the contributor's page
for that opensource repo

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jamessb
It seems like the repository type in GitHub already handles several of these
cases.

A user's list of repositories can already be filtered by "type", and this
handles several of his cases:

> aicioara-forks — Projects I contributed to. Anything that I pressed “fork”
> on goes here.

These gets automatically classified as type "Forks".

> aicioara-old — Repositories that contain code I may want to refer to later,
> but I do not really want to be associated with. Maybe it’s a high school or
> university project with no stars and which no longer reflect the way I code.
> I don’t have time to update them, I still need to refer to them sometime,
> but I don’t want them to say “hey, this is how Andrei is coding today”.

These can be marked as "Archived"
([https://help.github.com/articles/archiving-a-github-
reposito...](https://help.github.com/articles/archiving-a-github-repository/))

This leaves the "boilerplate" and "gh-pages" categories, which could be
indicated by adding prefixes to the corresponding repo names. If the
boilerplate code is not intended to be generally useful it could be put in a
private repository (especially as all users now have an unlimited number of
free private repos

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tracker1
If you do a web edit/pr, github will create a fork on your account for that
PR... this happens to me if I do a quick readme submission (a few times a
month) ... I go in every few months and constantly surprised the number of
lingering forks I have. I really wish that if the fork was created to do a
documentation edit in the web interface, when the PR is requested, if the only
things in the fork are that edit, it would just vacuum it away for me.

Aside: I've also forked repos just to remember to look at them later. I really
need to get in the habbit of curating my browser bookmarks better... I don't
trust them though as the syncing has sometimes borked them.

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jwilbs
I find it very hard to believe any recruiter/interviewer would be turned off
that my top 6 repos featured a mix of popular and unpopular, personal and
forked repos.

Limiting exposure of my open-source contributions to organizations adds not
only another layer of search, but the opportunity for me to get passed up
because my contributions to ___ weren’t immediately apparent.

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julvo
TLDR: Use organisations as folders for repositories

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3KQgt0Cl
Private repositories are now free to use by the way.

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dspoka
Something I came across for this :
[https://app.astralapp.com/](https://app.astralapp.com/)

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aicioara
[https://astralapp.com/](https://astralapp.com/) should be a better link where
the project is explained.

