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I would never take negative signal from a GitHub profile, because for many, many developers, that will not be a meaningfully sized or representative example of
by patio11 9y ago
I would never take negative signal from a GitHub profile, because for many, many developers, that will not be a meaningfully sized or representative example of their professional output. There exist many employers where you can do excellent work for many, many years and never OSS a single line of it.
I also think that the developer community far overestimates how much "have a good Github" is worth in terms of creating career equity, both because the people who you attempt to influence via it are largely not developers and, to the extent they are developers, are unlikely to spend hours looking at your Github profile trying to extract signal from it. You can probably get superior results for far less effort by writing ~3 good technical blog posts. (Do what makes you happy, naturally, but to the extent that getting well-paying exciting jobs generally makes people happy I'd recommend almost everyone treat having a small number of technical blog posts like exercise, in the "simply too useful not to do" bucket.)
- lj3 9y agoAny tips for what to target in those three technical blog posts? Would something rudimentary like 'how to create your first react application' be less impressive than something like 'how I cured cancer with the blockchain'?
- microcolonel 9y agoGeez, surely you could shoot for a middle ground: something you have a unique insight on, but is within reason for others to want to learn about.
- good_vibes 9y agoWhat are some topics for a technical blog post that you would like to see? I'd consider myself an advanced beginner or a novice intermediate developer. I can't get better if I delude myself about how 'great' I am.
- sundaeofshock 9y agoSpeaking by as a hiring manager, I'd be very interested in a blog post that a) defines a real world problem you are facing, b) describes your approach to solving the problem and c) provides details of the actual solution. Basically, you are answering a key interview question for me. Also, I'm not looking for a cure for cancer here. It can be something that you faced in your notmal developer life, or it could be a silly personal life thing. The key is to show me how you go about solving problems.
- good_vibes 9y agoThanks! Revamping my personal site and portfolio, thinking of how to best pitch myself as a designer-developer with previous experience as a technician and in sales. I will try to do each of those for each item in my portfolio to highlight my design thinking and technical acumen.
- TylerE 9y agoQuite the opposite. I'd assume the latter is misleading bullshite.
- nunez 9y agoNot at all! Especially since React is super popular right now. People love reading intros into stuff. As for good things to write about: has anything about your work bother you lately? Are you struggling with a problem that you can't crack? Are you trying to learn about something new and want to elaborate on why you're learning it? Write about those things.
- good_vibes 9y agoNoted. I was at a coding bootcamp for a little while last year and some of the people around me made me feel like I wasn't 'as serious' because I didn't have as much green on my contributions. My rationale: I put a lot of thought into my designs and learn best by Googling tutorials of 'how to build x', it's not always something I care to share in that way. My gut says I should follow your advice instead of worry about 'how lit' my contributions are. :) This coming week is gonna be a productive one!
- threatofrain 9y agoYou say you would never take negative signal from Github, because the sample size would be too small and non-representative of their normal output, but surely even a handful of projects is a lot of information relative to whatever a company can interview in the space of how many hours?
- JamesBarney 9y agoThere is more information there buts it's not useful information until a trusted technical lead goes through all of those projects, and then questions the interviewee about them. And this takes loads of time, and is incredibly hard to standardize.