> But someone with an active open source project on github and a popular blog seems like an easy interview, but I've never had the opportunity to speak with anyone like that.

I have many thousands (tens, definitely; hundreds, maybe) of lines of code I've written on GitHub. I also have a blog (not sure I'd call it popular though). In my recent interviews (which I blogged about at length) I don't think _anyone_ had looked at my repos on GitHub. Certainly no one asked questions about those projects. A few had read my blog, however.

A couple times I did show them some of my work on GitHub, primarily a project I was working on at the time that had a UI I could screen share.