Transcript from the "Employer-Ready Github Profile" Lesson
[00:00:00]
>> When it comes to GitHub, a lot of people, they're only focusing on four things. They're focusing on repo activity and used to be in old days that was it. But now it's repo activity it's your pin projects, is your profile, the GitHub profile itself. And it's about how you're doing things.
[00:00:20] Is just as powerful as a resume, it's basically the new way to tell your story if you're not using a portfolio or in conjunction with a portfolio. So, I actually have one here of one of my troops. Let me, here you go, Adrian Grimm. This is his GitHub portfolio, his GitHuB profile.
[00:00:49] It shows a nice picture of him, this is a good picture, with him is all happy stuff like that's Marines smiling, right. I mean, that's what you get when you ask a Marine to smile, [LAUGH] I don't know what to tell you. This is all his story, he's making it personal, is like you know where he's coming from.
[00:01:11] He's coming from artillery to database admin, he's on Android development. And now he's with etsuko as your front end development. He has added his most used languages, which I have included here. Plugins you can use, so you got this. You have the GitHub Readme Stats Vercel app, shout out to Anurag Hazra and his crew for hosting it.
[00:01:40] But this is a Vercel app that basically makes cards so you can add to your repos to show just your stats and your username. I highly recommend you use these, because they tell a story. You have themes, it's pretty awesome. This is kinda cool, I wish it was out when I was looking for a job.
[00:02:04] I'd use this in a New York minute. And we have the GitHub profile views counter. And it gives you an indicator of how good your profile is doing, right? It lets you know how many people shown and seen your stuff, right? So going back to this, I know that his most used languages and his GitHub status is right here, he has a little Gif, be here.
[00:02:40] I try to tell them not to put their emails on here because that's how you get like a bunch of crazy stuff emailed to you, a bunch of spam. He has his pin projects, now pin projects are the things that you want the employers or people looking at your site to go towards, right, you're trying to influence by design, right?
[00:03:04] People by nature are lazy, so when you put your pin projects repos there, you're intentionally putting your best work easiest place for them to find. So that way they will gravitate towards it versus, your most recent repo, it might be a garbage repo or something that you just do training or you playing with the new technology.
[00:03:27] So instead of like the more random process, you are actually guiding them and making it intentional for them to find the type of work, find your best work, right? And here's his contributions within the last year. As you can tell, he has been busy, way busier than me clearly.
[00:03:52] He's really been pushing and so this is something that although as a community we really try to get hiring managers to move away from this. But we have to work with what the world is, not how we want it to be. And one of the things that they're doing is they're still looking at GitHub as your repo activity, so you have to prepare for that.
[00:04:15] My advice is do something like your portfolio, your profile site, and consistently and continuously add, I'm sorry, add features to your profile, to your portfolio so that way you can continue to get those squares green. Changing colors, adding blocks, add in a dark mode. Things that you find in community are cool and you're like okay, this is how I should do it, this is what I wanna do, let me go do it.
[00:04:46] Going back up here remember we talked about copy, right? So this is what he's done up here, he started copy, he did, he added some personality to it. He's talking about the work that he's done, he's talking about his experience with that Sukkot, he's talking about his experience with fun and development.
[00:05:03] He has organizations up here, he's participated in developer program, mentor and Arctic code vault contributor. He has everything like his website and his Twitter up here. It's a very clean repo and it's the first thing that the employer is gonna see, right? So that's what you wanna do, like this is a relatively new thing that they've pushed out and it's something that you really want to use as a tool.
[00:05:32] As another tool that helps you break that threshold of becoming a frontend developer. There's another guy, Jason, he does a lot of things at Gatsby, and I think his is really wild. I'm not gonna mess around and figure it out because I'm gonna mess up spelling his last name.
[00:05:53] And I don't want that on camera, so he [INAUDIBLE] me in the DMs, so I'm gonna pass on that.
>> Jason.af
>> So I just go jason.af and I'll be able to find his. Click and see, this is a crazy portfolio I just wanted to get your GitHub man, [LAUGH] Here we go.
[00:06:19] Yeah, he can do everything great but grow hair. So yes, I hope that goes into this workshop so he knows that I clown him for being bald headed on live workshop. And I can't wait till he sees this [LAUGH] he's gonna get me. Yeah, so this is a great way he has his profile, he has the projects that he wants people to share.
[00:06:42] He's another person that is making me look bad on Twitter, I mean on GitHub with all of his contributions of the year. So like this is how it stores and see this short little bit of information that is like okay, this is all you know about me. And he's showing a little bit of fun whle he's talking about the things that he does right?
[00:07:06] As a worker who neds to know about that you're okay at making drinks, alcoholic beverages? But it works, it humanizes him, makes it easier to approach HR, it disarms HR. That's what humor is used, humor is used to disarm. It's an amazing disarming tool that we use in the military when we're going through crazy things right?
[00:07:30] So the humor disarms HR, to make him seem more personal, that makes him easier to approach. So that way they can talk to him about the options they have. As a internal developer, you should use that too, that's something that we've learned, mid and senior devs that we use.
[00:07:47] When you see all these quirky things in our Twitters, we're doing that as a way to convey that we don't take ourselves too seriously. We are approachable, come talk to us. Cuz you never know what type opportunities are gonna be there or who I can help, so that's what that's there for.
[00:08:04] And he's actually really helpful person, he's follically challenged. I'm sorry, I just love making fun of him. [LAUGH] Do we have any questions about this?
>> Are there examples of resumes with less experience? It seems like all of these are flushed out.
>> Well, let's say Adrian, he's not really well established.
[00:08:27] He's only been learning how to code for I think a year, so he's not well established at all. He's green, he's a rookie, so I can say that from, he's come through my program he's very green. It just is how hard we tend to push people. No, yeah, but he's I think, yeah, started a year ago.
[00:08:55] He started a year playing with Android stuff then found us, converted into JavaScript so he's green. He's green as they get, he's less than a year into it. Just a lot of work, which is what I keep saying, keep producing, keep building. We're gonna get more into that later, cuz I want you guys not to be intimidated by this stuff but like this should motivate you, to do yeah, I need to do more work, right?
[00:09:17] Cuz the guys out here who they're calling green and rookies, they're doing 1000 commits a year, right? So that's the whole mentality, and when I say there's no. Bruce Lee actually said it best, rather be overtrained than undertrained. He wasn't saying overtraining, over working out, he was saying is being over prepared, right?
[00:09:36] There's no such thing as being over prepared, right? There's a such thing as being underprepared but you can't ever be over prepared. And this is a great example, somebody who isn't, while they're newer to code like they are putting in the work and they're doing those reps. Because what we do is a skill, it is a craft that is closer to alchemy than anything else, right?
[00:10:02] It's magic and science combined in one. We use about thing that you can learn through academia, but you only get better of it when you actually apply it and experience, right? So that's what you have to do. The academia part is fine, but you have to constantly and consistently build and do things to really get that level of mastery.
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>> How would you handle private repos, and how would you handle, like I did work for somebody else, and I have to sign an NDA, so how do I handle that in a job interview, showing them the code and all of that?
>> I recommend building a project on your own that you can host, that basically showcases your skills.
[00:10:49] One project, first and foremost, having one project that deep dive is worth more than seven projects that are like small boilerplate concepts, right? So one project where you can consistently add things to is always gonna be better than you see it on everybody's portfolio. They have three projects and it's all JavaScript calculators and all this other crap, but no one cares about any of that stuff.
[00:11:18] So what you wanna do is, you wanna focus on just consistently adding to your project, so that people can see your skills. Even if you have that hurdle of NDAs, I can't show you work cuz of the repo's private. That's where consistently producing things for yourself comes into play.
[00:11:45] That's just but one example, like getting your employers attention.
>> How important is it to have green commits on your GitHub user profile?
>> It depends, sometimes it's an issue, sometimes it's not. I have been one of those people who've never had a lot of green on my repo activity.
[00:12:05] And because what I've done to do that, is I've offshored it by doing other things. Like focusing on education or talks or writing. I'm a big writer, right, I do a lot of writing when it comes to blogs. So, is more of, all right, this is great, but you can show your niche in other places.
[00:12:26] Like that's just a really good portfolio. If you have everything else is A1, they say, your repo activity is great, this is just one of the indicators. There are four parts there, right? So going back here, you have the profile, you have the plugins, you have the pin projects.
[00:12:46] Then at the very bottom you have the contributions of the last year. This is just one part of four where they're gonna take all of this to grade you on, right? So this person is pushing really hard to have all four, done really well, he's done a really good job of this.
[00:13:04] But as long as you have a nice clean repo I mean, they're gonna be like okay, you actually care. Manicured projects outlay a lot of work done on projects that don't really care about, so that's fine.