What if I wanted to reinvent the wheel to increase my knowledge?
My repos are hidden specifically because I do them for fun. I’d make them public if tinkering were an understood thing but its not.
> If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
Better to have a clear separation between work and play.
Make it private like you are doing?
If you don't want someone to perceive something about you, then don't make it public. If you do make it public and add it to a resume then don't be surprised if the person who manages programmers is interested in possibly looking at the programming that person has done.
I proposed that you can tinker in public if you make sure your tinkering won't be confused for your magnum opus. You dismissed that because a one sentence readme isn't needed on a public side project.
I didn’t say anything about adding a link to a resume. This thread has hints of people thinking “I’ll just look up their GitHub if they don’t include it” and other threads make that explicit.
> You dismissed that because a one sentence readme isn't needed on a public side project.
I don’t think that’s what I said. I was saying that tracking all the things one might be judged for is unreasonable, not that having a readme is unreasonable.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Your comment is a great reason for me not to share my Github profile.
I'm not going to treat my Github project defensively. The notion that most people need to worry about what they put in their README because some interviewer is going to look at it - it's just so much better not to let them see your Github profile.
The irony with this article is that it's proposing a solution to a problem - yet that solution is as problematic. A resume is a poor indicator of one's skills, as is their Github profile.
I'd argue with you that a GitHub profile could be a useful signal, but it's not a given.
As a hiring manager:
- If they don't have a GH profile, I won't ding them.
- If they add it to the resume, and it's a scrap yard, I won't ding them.
- If they add it to the resume, and it's well maintained, I will ask questions about it.
- If they add it to the resume, and it's clearly deception, I will have a negative perception.
I feel like most hiring managers take this approach.
The message is "I code in ny spare time" not "this is representative of my professional work"
It's a personal project. I do it for fun. I didn't write tests because it wasn't fun. I cut corners to get to the fun part faster. I made breaking changes because the one single user accepted them.