Hacker News Reader

Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

I self-host Forgejo for personal and indie-startup purposes, and like it well enough.

The downside with that is it misses one of the key purposes of GitHub: posturing for job-hunting/hopping. It's another performative checkbox, like memorizing Leetcode and practicing delivery for brogrammer interviews.

If you don't appear active on GitHub specifically (not even Codeberg, GitLab, nor something else), you're going to get dismissed from a lot of job applications, with "do you even lift, bro" style dissing, from people who have very simple conceptions of what software engineers do, and why.

View on HN

There is a fairly straightforward feature in Forgejo to sync your repos to Github, if that's what you want to do. It's not perfect, of course, but should help to advertise your projects and keep your activity heatmap green.

I mostly use Forgejo for my private repos, which are free at Github, but with many limitations. One month I burned all my private CI tokens on the 1st due to a hung Mac runner. Love not having to worry about this now!

or you can just have two remotes and push to both sites and enjoy git's distributed nature

I do this, but beware if you have LFS files. You can easily get into weird states with LFS pushing up to two different remotes and it's really not fun to fix.

> If you don't appear active on GitHub specifically... you're going to get dismissed from a lot of job applications

Sometimes wonder if my coursemates back in the days, who automated commits to private repos just to keep the green box packed, actually got any mileage out of it.

I get that. To counter it I usually try to have at least one public repo on my Forgejo instance and link to that on my resume/LinkedIn. It helps that I'm angling for security/infra positions so the self-hosting aspect actually helps but even without that I would imagine it signals something. Maybe not ideal for the most mainstream jobs (whatever that even means...), but I suspect some people will be intrigued by the initiative.

Edit: to the "do you even lift bro", the response becomes "yeah man, I've built my own gym - oh, you go to Planet Fitness? Good luck."

Fine with me. Not the type of jobs I want anyway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com