That's silly. I don't even have a GitHub account.<p>All my professional life ( 20+) I've been writing code or building solutions for private companies, all the cool stuff I programmed lies in a private repository.<p>And for the reference, I am always sending nicely PDF-formatted, very relevant, but succinct, CV and not a "poorly formatted, badly designed Microsoft Word template filled with irrelevant information you’ve carefully curated to make you look like the best programmer ever".<p>What's wrong with this guy??
While I agree that Github is a part of your resume, I don't think it's the whole thing. If I was providing a link to my account when applying for a job, I would probably link to some specific projects and provide some narrative around them, rather than just saying "here's 20 projects I've worked on, go nuts". If the recruiter wants to look through everything else then fine, but they shouldn't expect perfection from everything.<p>Some other thoughts I had on the article:<p>"Too many forked repositories": You just need to click on Sources[1] to see the user's actual repos.<p>"Missing or unclear descriptions": If repos are just simple little side-projects, they don't necessarily need descriptions - I know what they are, I know what they do, they aren't there for anyone but me, I don't expect them to be starred or forked.<p>"Old repositories": So because I wrote something a year ago, I can never go back to it? What's wrong with having a record of achievement? A display of progress.<p>"Mediocre code": If we were only allowed to store perfect code, there would never be any code on Github.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/danielsamuels?tab=repositories" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/danielsamuels?tab=repositories</a>
"The work you did a year or more ago couldn’t possibly still be relevant today."<p>Are you 16 years old?<p>Tech changes quickly, but not that quickly. A GitHub repository with older projects would be useful to show depth and variety of experience. Just because it's not all using the latest Rails 4.1 doesn't mean that it won't show insight into professional skills like, say, well organized code, playing well with others - not to mention a longer-term outlook that isn't just chasing the latest shiny thing.
No, it is not my CV. I share and star everything I find interesting. I push any code I want without worrying if it is cool or not. I am a programmer, not a pop star.
I read this as a satire, and laughed thoroughly.<p>I do agree that GitHub provides a good look into a coder's abilities, though, and many companies agree. It's disappointing that, 2 years after this article came out, you still can't select which repos you want to display on your profile. <sigh>
Remove all projects over a year old that you haven't touched? Such bad advice. I've fixed up some old projects of mine that are 2+ years old. Was a great way to see what I was doing wrong back then and apply new knowledge.<p>I don't think this is satire, but it's definitely misguided.
It's too bad for all of the corporate programmers who aren't able to share the code they've written without violating an NDA or other agreement. Some companies even take ownership of code written outside of company time, via the employment agreement, so even developing things on personal time is a no-go.
Wow, so much bad advice in one blog post.
"Missing or unclear descriptions"
I'll add a description to my github repos now: "Don't take it as my resume"
This makes no sense at all. GitHub is your resume, so here are some silly rules you need to follow to cram that square peg into that round hole. If you need to artificially limit what code you host on a code hosting site to use it as your resume, maybe it's because code hosting sites don't make good resumes.
This is troublesome to me. I'm just completing my MS in CS and have been coding at my job, but all of that has been on private repos (and have been rush jobs at times so they're not the most well formatted).<p>I can't share any work code I've written, and the projects look terrible. Would having several commits that say something along the lines of "made it look like less of a hack job" be a good idea? They can go back and see how terrible it looked before, but it was for a class and I had to get it done before I could start on my other class's assignment.<p>I feel like what I've written could get me a junior dev job, but I know I would quickly outgrow that based on the work I've done before (or maybe I'm giving myself too much credit).
I have a blog post brewing in my head about all of the vanities of GitHub: commit activity, stars, forks, organizations, working on 'important' projects. GH's handling of these is considerably less hacker-oriented (more stars = better projects!!!!).<p>> The work you did a year or more ago couldn’t possibly still be relevant today<p>Oh man, wait til you discover Lisp.<p>This guy's insistence on making a GitHub profile so important really bothers me. I love GitHub, but it's just a stupid account on a webapp. There are plenty of great devs who aren't committing OSS. Since when were hackers so obsessed with image?
Like all posts on this subject (resumes, interviews, and the like), you should also amend the headline and advice with " when interviewing with me." I've never seen the same set of advice given by two different people.<p>That being said:<p>> "The work you did a year or more ago couldn’t possibly still be relevant today. If it is, you aren’t working hard enough or learning fast enough. Get rid of anything you haven’t worked on in over a year."<p>After reading this part, I can't imagine this is a serious article. This is so absurdly false, it can't be anything more than a troll on the idea that Github is your resume.<p>Can someone add "satire" to the headline?
I don't use GitHub to show off, and most of the points in the post are very bold.<p>"The work you did a year or more ago couldn’t possibly still be relevant today." - yeah I should delete all my work because it is not fresh enough, although there is nothing I have to do.<p>"Don’t waste your time building unimportant things." - Important for whom? You? Me? Public?<p>"GitHub is your portfolio." - No, it is a place to share projects and contribute to others. If you want to use it as a portfolio, It shows your most starred projects anyway.<p>You take the GitHub as a personal promotional page, rather than collobarative environment.
I fought this for a while, then gave in and spruced it up a bit (I mostly commit to private repos not on Github). The argument "If you don't have open repos you don't write code in your free time and are therefore probably not very good at coding" is full of gigantic holes. But, I get that everyone has their little arbitrary things they use to whittle down the herd of candidates.<p>I'm not doing LinkedIn, though. I'm not.
> "The work you did a year or more ago couldn’t possibly still be relevant today."<p>Funny how the first project on author's github page (<a href="https://github.com/brandonweiss" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/brandonweiss</a>) is over two years old.<p>This is satire, right? Right?
This is somewhat unrelated, but wouldn't it be nice if there was a tool that would let you connect with Github, choose 3 or 4 of your favorite projects, and it would generate a cool looking resume/site for you? Does this already exist??