I think this would only be true for school projects or for research. Most projects are relatively shallow and uninteresting--they're great for learning, but no

I think this would only be true for school projects or for research. Most projects are relatively shallow and uninteresting--they're great for learning, but not good testaments of your skill. The sort of projects professors are going to worry about are the sort where you get an extremely detailed spec and a bunch of code to start from, and all you have to do is fill in the blanks. This sort of project is great for grading--everybody basically writes the same thing--but pretty meaningless otherwise. If you have a really open-ended project where you get to come up with your own design and code everything yourself, I really doubt a professor would stop you from posting it. I'm working on a project like that right and the professor encourages us to open-source it. If you're doing research, you may also have issues with copyright. I'm not sure you will, but it's plausible. However, at the very least, you'll be able to link to your papers, which is also good. That said, the research projects my friends are working on are all up on GitHub, so it clearly isn't an issue there. Finally, especially as a student, you should have some nice side projects outside of class. I don't think you would have any problems posting code that you worked on entirely by yourself. And this is exactly the code that is most interesting.