Ask HN: What is your definition of a good GitHub profile? - vishnuks
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eastbayjake
It's hard to judge by commits alone because your public profile doesn't
reflect contributions to private repos, which for many of us is our 9-5 work.
I look for meaningful open source contributions or a side project the engineer
is passionate about, and within those repos I usually skim for code style but
I check commit messages and documentation. (I don't want to work with an
engineer who writes commit messages like "Misc shit WIP" or "lol 3 AM", and I
don't want to maintain code written by someone whose README.md is blank or a
placeholder. Part of this is the more I learn about software engineering, the
more I realize that making code intelligible to other people on the team is so
much more important than elegant code that only the author understands. If
you're optimizing for elegance, you're trading a few bytes of compressed
storage space for hours of an engineer's on-the-clock time trying to figure
out what the heck you did.)

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johnpolacek
I am shocked by how few candidates have much of a Github profile at all. So
the good news is that it is easy to stand out.

Have some projects that are finished. They don't need to be extravagant. Just
show that you can ship code and know how to explain how/why to use it in the
README or for extra points a nice gh-pages demo page. Once you have a few
projects under your belt, you can create a nice home for them with your
username by making a public repo with a project name of username.github.com -
see [https://pages.github.com](https://pages.github.com)

For front end, if you prefer codepen over Github as your online code portfolio
of choice, that is fine too (at least in my opinion). Or both.

~~~
jacquesm
I'm shocked that employers would even think of requiring you to have a github
profile, more so a public one.

Think about it: having a full-time job and a life implies that large numbers
of very employable people have absolutely no time whatsoever left over to
dedicate to maintaining a current set of contributions to high profile open
source projects, let alone 'some finished projects'.

If a company can't figure out during the interview that a person is able to
ship code then they should review their hiring practices, not pass the burden
to their potential hires.

Also, you're probably de-selecting all the women developers because it's very
rare indeed to come across a profile of a female on github.

~~~
rubiquity
The extra hilarious part of what I like to call "The GitHub Paradox" is that
99% of the companies wanting you to have a fleshed out GitHub profile don't
have one themselves and none of their current employees do either.

~~~
wmil
Haven't you heard? You're supposed to put in 10 hours a day at the office,
then go home and write blog posts for the company, then make meaningful
contributions to multiple open source projects.

Oh, and drop half your take home pay on hardware and software so you can be up
to date on whatever tech they decide to go with in the future.

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RKoutnik
Anything, really. So long as they aren't a dipwad in comments, etc, any
information I can glean from a GH profile is a net positive. It's very hard to
have a "bad" profile - I don't want to ding candidates for having a life
outside of showcasing their work for me.

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gtk40
Similar question: what about using a site besides Github? I use Bitbucket and
link there from my homepage. I don't contribute to any FOSS projects besides
my own in my freetime, but prefer Bitbucket for various reasons (principally
because I have a bunch of barely-started idea projects and practice bins and I
generally only make something non-private after I get somewhere, which I can't
do for free with GitHub). Am I missing out by not using Github particularly?

~~~
bbcbasic
Use both. Have GitHub for your public work, and stick your privates in the
'bucket.

~~~
gtk40
For discover-ability? Because the public features of BB seem to work just fine
for me, and then all I have to do is change one quick setting to make it
public. I know git isn't all that hard to migrate over, but even so.

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woodruffw
When I'm looking at someone's GitHub profile, I like to see a few different
things:

* A diversity of projects is always nice, whether in languages/technologies used or in scope. I tend to be unimpressed if a person's most active repositories are essentially iterations of the same technology/idea.

* An active contribution history, both to their own repositories and others. That doesn't mean constant contributions to a 3rd-party project or membership in it, but it's nice to see that a person is taking the time to look at and offer their skills/effort to others.

* More superficially, I really like to see personal websites. That's less of a profile thing, but it tells me that you're committed to your online presence beyond filling out GitHub's 5-minute signup.

Overall, I'd say that 80% of the profiles I see meet two out of three of
those, and 60% meet all three. The only things I _really_ hate seeing in
GitHub profiles are blank repositories/repos that look slapped together for
appearances.

~~~
YooLi
_"...but it tells me that you're committed to your online presence..."_

Why do you feel an online presence is important to an employment candidate?

~~~
woodruffw
Who said anything about employment?

The question asked how I defined a "good" GitHub profile.

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kevinSuttle
Care given to onboarding new teammates is a huge plus for me. I have
interviewed and screened a few hundred developers over the last 2 years. I
will always dig into their code first.

I look for good naming, organization, and how easy a new developer will be
able to ramp up given the environment he or she has established.

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ffn
Anything that's not a bad github profile would be a good profile. Ideally, I
would want someone who has done a lot of open source pull requests, or has
some interesting projects, or has contributed to some big-name existing
project. But even if you don't have that, a profile showing you actively work
on programming as a hobby / for fun is a great way to say something about your
interest in this career.

On the other hand, I've hardly ever come across a profile that felt truly
"bad" to me. The one exception would be that one guy whose history of pull
requests is filled political-correctness-fueled changes to comments and
function names.

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dblock
I look for consistency, someone who either has no contributions (doesn't make
them a bad developer, just not working on public things) or has regular steady
contributions. Anyone who has a bunch of green dots in the last couple of
weeks and a bunch of green dots months ago makes me just discard the github
profile as a useful positive signal.

~~~
tjr
_Anyone who has a bunch of green dots in the last couple of weeks and a bunch
of green dots months ago makes me just discard the github profile as a useful
positive signal._

Ooh, you just more or less described me. What makes working on public things,
say, one weekend every couple of months less interesting than not working on
public things at all?

~~~
akerl_
It sounds like the thing being watched out for is "they clearly didn't do open
source things until somebody said that open source looks good to recruiters",
and so their recent work is more suspect. Not sure I agree 100%, but the
"green dots start when they start job-hunting" pattern is pretty common.

~~~
quotedmycode
Considering that they don't have a job, and thus have more free time to
contribute shouldn't make them look bad. I have a job, I do my job, I go home.
Occasionally (like on my birthday) I donate some of my spare time to projects
that I care about, and you'll see contributions for a while then I get back to
regular stuff which isn't open source. If that looks bad to a potential
employer then that's not the kind of employer that I want.

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caevv
do people really need to have a github profile to get hired nowadays? Am I a
bad dev if I "only" code from 9to5 in a company and do different things in my
spare time then contributing to open source? It's a bit off topic I know, but
I read those github profile threads everywhere.

~~~
Avalaxy
No, you really don't need to. But some people just want to put in more effort
than others and will try to land a better job.

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lemmon7
Empty github profiles don't say anything good or bad because of private
repositories not showing up on the commit graph. I put my own junk on
bitbucket anyway because there's no reason for the world to need to see it in
99.99999% of cases.

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daimajia
How about mine? [https://github.com/daimajia](https://github.com/daimajia)

