Maybe, maybe-not. Couple things: some of my "personal projects" are more than just learning some new things. Often the project is for scratching an itch, and

Maybe, maybe-not. Couple things: some of my "personal projects" are more than just learning some new things. Often the project is for scratching an itch, and is a useful thing to me. That's the type of stuff that I will "polish." This forces me to not only learn the new language, but to write code idiomatically, write unit tests, etc. For "junk projects" that are solely to play around with some new thing, I think it's okay to make that clear in the README of the project and still put it in a public repo. If I'm an employer, I'm going to like the fact that you're actively learning new things; if it's a "play" project, made clear in the README, I wouldn't hold against you writing crappy code. Instead, I'll be more impressed that you're actually learning new things. Just my $.02.