Ask HN: Do you use dedicated GitHub/NPM/etc. accounts for work? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you use dedicated GitHub/NPM/etc. accounts for work?

10 pointsmaxhallinan6 comments

I'm tired of work notifications mixing in with notifications about my personal projects on platforms like NPM and Github. I'm thinking of making separate accounts for work. It occurs to me that others might have found a nice solution to this problem. Is there any better option than simply making a second series of accounts?

View on HN

Since anything created for work belongs to work in most cases unless waived in your employment agreement. It is always best practice to keep work and personal accounts separate, even when you are the owner of the company for liability reasons.

I use my personal GitHub account for work. As far as I'm aware, all it means is I don't have to faff around with extra account logins and passwords; my account is already 2FA-enabled, and my individual repos are completely separate to my work code. My company repos are all private so it doesn't show in my public profile. The company admins can immediately lock me out of our repos. So, other than my GH handle being a HHGG reference, there's no real benefit to me using a separate account.

At employers where I trust the hardware not to be compromised I happily use my personal accounts. At my current place IT support can't easily get root access on my machine (at least without an audit trail) so I feel okay to enter my personal account's credentials into the work machine.

If your IT staff has full remote root access on your machine I would avoid this though - they can easily key log your password or add a root certificate to break HTTPS and get access to your personal account's password, and from there all hell can break loose.

I have 2 github accounts: one for my job and the other one for my personal projects. It really simplify the process of dealing with notifications and when you leave your job, you just forget about your account.

Not sure if you use it but I think you can assign a notification email for organisations in GitHub

Indeed, under Settings → Notifications → Custom Routing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com