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Comment by anishathalye | Hacker News Reader

I wish GitHub had a better way of distinguishing repositories (all the random experimental repos I've created or repos I've forked for the purpose of making a small contribution, sorted by last modified time) that show up on the profile page from "projects" (repos I'd want people to check out if they're interested in seeing what I've worked on). Pinned repos help with this, but the arbitrary limit of 6 pinned repos is a challenge. I'd prefer it if I could keep my public repositories unlisted and only list pinned repos.

I'm using a self-contained profile generator powered by GitHub actions, similar to the one in this blog post, to work around the pinned repo limit and add a bit of extra organization on the profile page: https://github.com/anishathalye/anishathalye/blob/master/gen...

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> I wish GitHub had a better way of distinguishing repositories … from "projects" (repos I'd want people to check out if they're interested in seeing what I've worked on).

GH doesnt do this because they want to be “social” and, because most people don’t actually contribute to a large number of other projects, this helps beef up peoples’ profiles.

I agree with you that this creates a lot of chaff (I almost typed “spam“) in your profile. It’s dumb that some random library I once submitted a fix to (via a PR) will sit around.

I suppose the saving graces are this causes you to write a little narrative on your profile page, and also does show hippy he breadth of your interests and experiences.

But the urge to make everything some kind of social network experience is a pain.

>that some random library I once submitted a fix

You can always delete the repo when you're done.

That’s what I eventually do once I’ve noticed the fix has gone in.

Yes, I try to do this, but it's extra effort to remember. I usually try to clean up my public repositories once every couple of months.

> It’s dumb that some random library I once submitted a fix to (via a PR) will sit around.

For these at least GitHub will tell you that the repo is a fork in the data available from their APIs.

Nice profile!

I agree that it'd be nice to be able to add some more metadata to repos. Here's a relatively ridiculous idea ... You could simply add a `REPO_META.JSON` file to some or all of your repos then a profile generator could just grab all of those. But keeping those up to date would become its own chore soon enough.

With my profile generator I tried to pick the most relevant to highlight by filtering out forks and then showing things with recent commits. Those are the most likely to be something I want people to see, as opposed to repos with experiments I last committed to 10 years ago.

I made this https://caub.github.io/github-clean-forks/ for cleaning up old forks

You can also use Github orgs for organising repos. Nothing stops you from putting all the forks into a "anishathalyes-forked-repos" org with no members.

I've thought about doing that, but I find the "Merge branch 'anishathalye-forked-repos/...'" that appears when people click the merge button on GitHub unattractive.

I don't think people pay attention to that usually. I don't care what whoever created PR called their branch.

If you called it anishathalye-contributions it would seem fairly friendly to me.

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