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GitHub is experimenting with personal READMEs
- boromi 6y agoI'm not a fan of turning GitHub into social media. Please GitHub don't go down this route.
- Jonnax 6y agoDidn't they have some feature years ago where you could tag people. And people took it as an opportunity to harass?
- hampelm 6y agoThe original tagline for GitHub was "Social Coding"
- rhn_mk1 6y agoGitHub is already social media. What else is the star system, the network of forks, the profile bio and the ability to comment?
- wayneftw 6y agoDon’t forget the most stereo typical characteristic of function for social media: following another user.
- kyboren 6y agoI totally get where you're coming from, but I follow people on GitHub exclusively because I want to see what code they're working on. I'm not following them because we have reciprocal social arrangement where we're "friends", or because I want to chit-chat with them, or see what they're eating, or what asinine 280 character fragments of streams of consciousness that they emit into the void, or to participate in the typical "best foot forward" profile stalking and preening BS that I can't stand about social media. GitHub is a social network, no doubt, but it is not social media and I hope that does not change.
- elliekelly 6y agoPerhaps I’m in the minority but I use the star system almost like a bookmark. Is that not what it’s for? Is a star the equivalent of a “like”?
- fileeditview 6y agoNot sure what it is for but everyone I talked to uses it as bookmark system.. so you are not alone.. to the contrary.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 6y agoWhat are your browser bookmarks for?
- TeMPOraL 6y agoYeah, me too. Stars are for me just Github-scoped bookmarks.
- rhn_mk1 6y agoThe number of stars and forks indicate the interest in the repository to me. I'm not sure if I'm convinced this has worked as a bookmark for my repositories: no one ever removed a star from any of them, and no one ever returned with any feedback later. It could be a matter of a small sample size, or of people never actually coming back (which is the bookmark's use case).
- miguelmota 6y agoAlmost every browser denotes 'favorites' with a star, so I’ve always thought 'starring' a project meant the same as bookmarking it or storing it as a favorite to reference later.
- soulclap 6y agoI remember when GitHub used to have private messaging. I liked that feature. It was an easy and unified way to get in touch with other coders on there and felt less intrusive than sending them e-mails out of the blue (or opening issues for the sake of communication, as some do).
- jeremy_k 6y agoThere have been times I've wanted to reach out to someone about their open source repository or a question and I've always wondered why there wasn't a messaging feature. Interesting to learn it used to be there.
- ViViDboarder 6y agoSame, but then I realized every commit contains the persons email, so I just email people.
- ViViDboarder 6y agoTurning into? It’s always been that. That’s actually one of the reasons it’s been successful. They are just leaning into it more.
- das_shark 6y agoGithub as social media?
- api 6y agoTime to collaboratively scrape the platform for archiving.
- httgp 6y agoI for one am looking forward to this — I’d love to use it as my resume.
- meddlepal 6y agoI like the idea... a bit concerned about the future potential that there is an expectation developers have a GitHub personal README (err "resume") tho. That's just not practical for a lot of folks either due to time, interest, or contractual reasons. On the other hand, most profession's do have portfolio's and other mechanisms to share work with new potential employers. For some reason developer's seem to think a hiring decision should be made entirely on a a handful of 1 hour interviews conducted in a single day when their work will usually have massive direct impact on the companies product. I think there's mostly positives to this and some downsides.
- DJHenk 6y ago> For some reason developer's seem to think a hiring decision should be made entirely on a a handful of 1 hour interviews conducted in a single day As opposed to... some generic profile on a central site? I don't think that is a substitute to actually talking to a candidate. But what do I know? If I understand sites like HN correctly, talking to a person is not a good way to discover whether he/she has any skills, so maybe this is better from a recruitment standpoint. But I'm not going to create a personal profile there. For the simple reason that the words 'personal' and 'follow our format' don't go together in my mind.
- davnicwil 6y agoA great piece of advice I heard I think from @patio11 is that you should really just host your own resume rather than letting a GitHub/LinkedIn/etc profile be your primary resume. Why? Because context is powerful. When people are viewing your resume, you want 100% of their focus on you, and you want to present yourself in exactly the way that's best for you. You don't want to present yourself within the context of another org's branding, site layout, etc, which by definition won't be optimised for you, and also syphons off some of that attention you want focused on you (as the most obvious example, say if the top bar has unread notifications). The irony is with Github, hosting an HTML resume 'on' Github is possible and really easy already via GH pages. It's what I do :-) https://davnicwil.com/cv/ https://davnicwil.com/cv/
- elesbao 6y agoscumbag managers rejoice, every other incarnation of "check my readme to understand me" before that was a disaster.
- numbsafari 6y agoI see this in the context of TripleByte attempting to take on LinkedIn. MS owns LinkedIn. This very much looks like an effort to turn GitHub profiles into LinkedIn-style profiles. This is not going to be pretty.
- zeta_ 6y agoExcept this one is opt-in and it was a feature request from the community
- robotron 6y agoOpt-in with the likely expectation that every developer worth hiring has one.
- ViViDboarder 6y agoWho’s expectation? I don’t expect developers I hire to have a GH profile. Most GH links I see on resumes are thoroughly unimpressive anyway (one or two college homework assignments and an untouched fork of some open source project). Having a good one is a plus, but having a poor one is worse than not having one.
- binarytox1n 6y agoAgreed: as a hiring manager I check every github profile I see on a resume. I have never been anything but disappointed.
- 91bananas 6y agoLol at that burn to Triplebyte. What a moronic decision that was on their part.
- eplanit 6y agoGitHub 2020: Aaaand it's gone.
- gazelle21 6y agoAwesome
- SingAlong 6y agoThis looks nice. I’m looking forward to using this as a page/list of blog posts/links.
- jedberg 6y agoI suspect you will soon see a project on github that will export your LinkedIn to read me format and vice versa. Maybe even a git hook to do it automatically.
- diminish 6y agoI think soon your github, vs code editor and windows 10 login will be connected with your linkedin profile.
- devmunchies 6y agoits like my own personal space. they should call this feature myspace.
- elliekelly 6y agoTime to dust off my CSS skills.
- ilikehurdles 6y agoNo need, just improvise. It will be more authentic that way.
- neatze 6y agoThis, and I do not like it.
- dundercoder 6y agoIMO - People are already viewing your github profile and making judgments, might as well be able to personalize what they see.
- souterrain 6y agoThey’ve rediscovered .plan files?
- robotron 6y agoThat was my first thought also: .plan with MD
- deft 6y agoThis is great, yet another place I have to repost my resume/portfolio/blog to satisfy the trend-following recruiters and hirers... Maybe I'll just do this # [CLICK HERE FOR MORE DETAILS](https://mysite.tld)
- koolba 6y agoBonus points if you make it a redirect loop so they get sucked into a never ending void.
- fermienrico 6y agothats...that's beautiful.
- saagarjha 6y agoI don't know, I think this is better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23340697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23340697
- nicbou 6y agoHook, line and sinker
- yencabulator 6y agoI've seen way too many Github projects where the "Website" link in the header is to the repo itself...
- fermienrico 6y agoI don't like Emojis in my documents. I think they are distracting. Tools like Notion is actively promoting it like this new Github profile docs. Does anyone else feel the same? :-)
- dhritzkiv 6y agoI suppose the answer is to simply not use Emoji in your documents.
- fermienrico 6y agoLol that's obvious. But, the trend is what I am concerned about and asking if others feel the same. I can't control if I am reading someone else document full of emojis. Can you imagine RFCs in this format? To me, Emojis have a place when you're discussing with others and socially interacting. May be even in code reviews to reduce friction and add some human emotion to what you're saying in cold words. Use it to chat with people - totally ok. Documents with emojis is definitely an anti-pattern IMO. To give an extreme example, can you imagine reading python docs with Emojis? Or Tolstoy? What about tax documents with emojis? Court proceedings? Job resumes? Aircraft emergency checklists?
- alexbanks 6y ago"I don't like emojis so they are an antipattern." I don't like emojis so I don't use them. I have no interest in demanding how other people define their docs.
- rhn_mk1 6y agoThis is not quite what the parent says. A big part is: "I don't like emoji. How do they make you feel?"
- plibither8 6y ago> I have no interest in demanding how other people define their docs. I definitely do not want emoji's in official documents, emergency procedures, etc. And I would demand for the same - emoji's are at best decorative, and a lot of times a distraction. Most documents that are of importance to me should be straightforwardly written - and that means no emojis.
- ken 6y agoWhen MSFT bought them, I predicted they would pivot to adding features I don’t care about. I was right. They went from the best support I’ve ever seen (report an issue, get a personal email asking for details, see it fixed) to the worst (not touching a single feature I find worthwhile). There’s about a thousand things I wish they would fix or add before this. They still don’t allow videos so every screencast demo on GitHub is still a giant GIF, right? I used to like GitHub so much I paid out of pocket even when I was unemployed. Now it’s on my list to check out GitLab again. Companies don’t know when to stop. It’s like they created the bicycle and add another wheel every year as an improvement.
- tourist2d 6y ago"GitHub is adding too many dumb features, btw please support my use case of having videos in my repo"
- LordIllidan 6y agoI've often wished this feature actually, especially when submitting pull requests, and you'd like to showcase the new features. I've often had to either embed a video link or convert to gif.
- kisna72 6y agoI use gifs for this and they work great!
- mikewhy 6y agoAs someone who likes to do previews in PRs, mp4's are infinitely better than gifs. Better colors, better frame rate, better resolution, better size when you change any of those factors. It's really, really silly GitHub still don't support them.
- toupeira 6y agoGitLab supports this: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/blob/master/doc/user/markdown.md#videos https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/blob/master/doc/user/ma...
- cordite 6y agoI kinda like this, a way to make the profile more personable rather than a vanity graph and select repos. But this emoji fascination is beyond me.
- Jefro118 6y agoThis is interesting move - I'm surprised they haven't done things like this earlier. The pinned repos was never a great way to provide an introduction since it lacks too much context. I've been experimenting with my own project [0] to get much more info out of GitHub profiles to demonstrate one's skills by generating portfolio sites, but if GitHub does a good job with this it might make my solution somewhat redundant. [0] - https://www.profiled.app https://www.profiled.app
- spv 6y agoPlease add math support in github markdown. Something real users need. Stop trying to make it a social network.
- saagarjha 6y agoI'd rather that they supported a standard like MathML or LaTeX.
- icey 6y agoThere was someone working on LaTeX support a few years ago, but iirc it was very difficult to secure it enough to feel comfortable letting it run server-side for rendering. Source: I worked there when they were working on it.
- haneefmubarak 6y agoWhat about client side rendering via MathJax? You could have your LaTeX code embedded in your markdown and MathJax could substitute it for appropriately rendered symbols as necessary.
- jcelerier 6y agogithub being a social network is the main reason of its success.
- mhh__ 6y agoIs it? Networking yes, social maybe? I don't have any memories of early GitHub but did any of it's competitors come close to being as good?
- natfriedman 6y agoWe're definitely going to add math support to GitHub markdown.
- maxfan8 6y ago
- jonchurch_ 6y agoThere are a lot of commenters sharing their opinions of what they don't like abut Github’s interface. It is true there are a lot of quirks and warts in what is a site many of us spend a lot of time on. Ive found browser extensions have been a great way to augment and customize my Github experience, bringing quality of life improvements that Im grateful to have every day. My top two favorites are: Refined Github [1] -- huge collection of quality of life improvements. e.g. always sort issues/PRs as most recently updated first, when recently pushed to a branch show a button on project page (or upstream of fork) to open a PR based on that branch, quicklink to most reacted to comment on an issue page. Also provides a surface to inject custom CSS for personal tweaks. Octolinker [2] -- Turns require/import/include paths in files into hyperlinks to that file or repository. I use this every single day to navigate code in projects. I know that extensions aren't a panacea, but personally I have found them be very valuable to my workflow. [1] https://github.com/sindresorhus/refined-github https://github.com/sindresorhus/refined-github [2] https://github.com/OctoLinker/OctoLinker https://github.com/OctoLinker/OctoLinker
- liminal 6y agoSome time ago there was an article posted with a proposal for redesigning the Github UI [1]. I thought it was mostly great, but it got roundly panned on HN. In general my takeaway was that people don't like change, even when it benefits them. Was unfortunate, especially from a crowd that's supposedly all about technological improvement. [1] https://tonsky.me/blog/github-redesign/ https://tonsky.me/blog/github-redesign/
- jonchurch_ 6y agoFound the link to the HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19276113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19276113
- agustif 6y agoOctotree is awesome too, and you can get the dark theme with the free account https://www.octotree.io/ https://www.octotree.io/
- 6y ago
- charlieegan3 6y agoSad to see such a negative reaction here. We have something similar internally - we call them personal user manuals. They explain how we like to work (e.g. communication preferences), and a little bit about ourselves. We ask new joiners to write theirs when they join. They make a good introduction to the company and can provide guidance when wondering how best to interact with others.
- randormie 6y agoI currently try to convey my (code) interests by pinning my favorite repositories on my profile, but this personal README is a ton more expressive. Looking forward to this!
- bpicolo 6y agoThis is cool - would love to make one.
- renewiltord 6y agoReminds me of personal user pages on Wikipedia. Very cool. I like it.
- dreamcompiler 6y agoMy first, automatic reaction to this was a whole-head eyeroll. Great. Now Github wants to be a social network. My second thought was "Hey if I used this I could delete my stupid Linkedin account."
- dancemethis 6y agoTime to start thinking on how to tell visitors that Github is an outdated mirror at best because they like to comply with ICE.
- naruhodo 6y agoLike it or not, people use github for self-promotion. It's not at all unusual for recruiters to ask about your github profile. The code repositories are the resume. The personal README is the cover letter.
- _the_inflator 6y agoGithub will be enhanced by LinkedIn features then I guess. Smart move by MS.