Dear GitHub: Please let us sort our projects | Hacker News Reader

Dear GitHub: Please let us sort our projects

oddshocks.com

233 pointsoddshocks68 comments

Strongly agree. Now that Github is being used as a de facto CV, it's really important for our Github page to show our strongest projects first.

If some silly project I contributed to 4 years ago pops up first on my Github page, most potential clients and/or employers are not going to make the effort to scroll through pages of projects to find the projects most representative of my current abilities.

On the bright side, this exact phenomenon has led me to go back and clean up a few projects of mine that became unexpectedly popular. Now they have documentation and updates that I probably wouldn't have made otherwise (although their popularity alone also propelled me to make these changes).

> Strongly agree. Now that Github is being used as a de facto CV,

First off, I really dislike this practice to begin with.

That said, under this practice, the current approach discourages people from forking others' repositories (I know at least one person who has a separate account just for this, so it doesn't "clutter" his list of repositories).

It also discourages contributing to new projects with fewer stars. Currently, my contribution to Github's linguist (1880 stars) shows up on my 5 "repositories contributed to". If I contribute to my friend's one-off project, it may or may not push that off and I have no way of knowing, since those five aren't even ordered in any way that I can make sense of. (I have experimented with this in the past, and the repository that seems to be bumped when I make a new submission is arbitrary, as far as I can tell).

When I was finishing university and looking for a job, I actually started deleting minor git repos that never really blossomed into bigger projects, because I was afraid of interviewers/potential employers going over those instead of the projects I was more proud of.

Now I kinda regret nuking all that work (didn't think to keep backups around), but a better solution for this would prevent anyone from doing similar in the future.

I just experienced the other side of this problem yesterday. I was checking out a job applicant who had a lot of repositories and I couldn't easily figure out which ones really mattered. Fortunately, he also had his own portfolio site. The github profile was effectively useless.

"The github profile was effectively useless." - exactly!

Related to this, forks, imo, should always be sorted to be after original repos.

If you're curious what contributions a user has made to their forks, I wrote a simple that breaks down # of commits per fork e.g. http://github-contributions.herokuapp.com/cldwalker

That's pretty cool, thanks!

Please don't use Github profiles as a CV.

Maybe open an issue here: https://github.com/isaacs/github

Visit this link after the one above to find a github easter egg :) https://github.com/contact

Haha, not intended to be an easter egg at all. That message happens for any non-Organization-owned, non-private, non-owned-by-you repo.

eg hit https://github.com/mbostock/d3 then https://github.com/contact

Just reads a bit funny in the case of https://github.com/isaacs/github :)

brenoc has kindly opened an issue here: https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/166

Thanks!

Yes, please!

I would also be happy with just being able to create groups on the repositories tab. Nothing fancy, just being able to say: "Hey, these are my old WordPress plugins; these are my esoteric projects etc."

Another GitHub nuisance: I'm a huge fan of pinboard.in and use the Firefox popup bookmarklet quite a bit but github repositories [1] won't let me bookmark them with the bookmarklet. GitHub repositories are literally the only pages I've found the I haven't been able to use the pinboard bookmarklet, and it's been that way with every single GitHub repository I've tried to pinboard.

[1] Strangely github.io pages bookmark just fine.

Have you asked Maciej about that? He may be able to fix it and he's super active on twitter https://twitter.com/pinboard/

The bookmarklet fails due to GitHub's content security policies[0], which disable inline scripts. I'd suggest installing the Pinboard browser extension to get around those limitations.

[0] https://github.com/blog/1477-content-security-policy

This is one thing that bugs me a lot about how centralised Github becomes: if you want any changes, you have to resort to begging with blog posts.

How else would you want it to be ?

when you can do individualized filters that'd be nice. I mean if the underlying data/format isn't touched, but you you can tweek how you consume stuff, that'd be nice.

And easy switching between filters. "Their default view", "your default view" etc.

Allow me to actually change this in the code. I don't really get github. They hold everyone's code and encourage everyone to share code, but they don't share their own.

This is why I left bitbucket:

https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issue/3054/make-bitbucket-...

Have you tried https://www.gitlab.com/gitlab-ce/ ?

Can I host my own gitlab instance and tell github users to pull from my gitlab instance? And can they do it with the usual interface that they use for closing github pull requests?

Ah, ya, you aren't going to be able to use Github's users on a Gitlab instance. It is like hosting your own copy of a Github-clone, basically. :/

You could write API integration between the two yourself but it wouldn't be that similar.

Imagine if we had to beg Google to fix Gmail if we wanted to email people our own way. :-(

Sorry my suggestion didn't help you, I just thought given your objections it might.

Ya, I host a GitLab instance for personal and one for work so I don't really have to deal with GitHub beyond when I am looking for open source projects.

Part of why my profile there is so empty :/

A public issue queue for github? :)

This will do for now: https://github.com/isaacs/github

Saw this in another thread on HN today: https://github.com/github-issues/github-issues. Similar goal as Isaac's repo.

Holman has one too: https://github.com/holman/feedback

GitHub could put up a voting user-oriented website much like the now discontinued Ubuntu Brainstorm.

I have plenty of ideas for them…

* allow symlinks in the gh-pages branch

* do not `chmod u+x` every text file in zip archives

* actually support `git-archive`

* make rebasing of PRs easier

* look for a contributor's code in a repo

* when looking at a file, have a link showing current PRs editing it

My problem with it isn't the medium for the begging, but that it has to be done by begging instead of doing.

Symlinks work for gh-pages. We use it for linking to the current version of the docs:

https://github.com/facebook/presto/tree/gh-pages/docs

http://prestodb.io/docs/current/

Hey electrum, There is a discussion on this matter over [1]. Other people and I still cannot get symlinks to work on gh-pages. Do you have any idea why that is? It could be because of a free vs. business GitHub account…

Cheers

[1]: https://github.com/Sidnicious/gh-pages-symlink-test/issues/4

And tag them also. And also tag our gists.

I've always wondered why github never had tags.

tagged gists! I could actually start using them for reference, in lieu of (or possibly in addition to) my current personal wiki.

He sounds like my project manager, when adding a new feature just by mentioning it during a demo, and sees our faces:

"What I'm asking wouldn't be hard at all"

:))

Unless you're intimately involved with the project or a guru in similar projects, you've got no idea whether any feature would be hard / simple, time-consuming/interesting.

...you've got no idea...

That's why they should be taking PRs.

I didn't mean to devalue the challenge of implementing and testing a new feature. All I'm saying is that it wouldn't require much problem solving. It'd just be a sorted list, perhaps with the ability to reorder and resize items with some JavaScript. The GitHub devs are obviously skilled coders, and have many JavaScript ninjas among them.

Personally, I am under the same impression as yours. Adding a custom order functionality should not be that difficult, even with all these types of repos (forks, private, org, etc). I would benefit from such a feature, as would my colleagues. But maybe there's a deeply nested technical debt that prevents them from doing that atm.

I was just bringing up the similarity between your apparent devaluation of the challenges a new feature brings, with my project manager's ability of adding "sure, done by tomorrow" features during demos :D

The difference is that these are pretty much all developers asking for features. You can guarantee that if github core was on github, the author would probably have wrote the feature and made a pull request instead of having to resort to asking via a blog post.

If GitHub profiles really are becoming the "new resume", I think users are need more control over them. Certainly sorting projects is a good start.

Well there's still GitHub pages...

Yeah, but potential clients and employers tend to look closely at your Github profile, regardless of what you've put up on GH Pages.

I think it would be awesome to be able to commit README for your user page. It would resolve the sorting problem too - you could just list your projects the way you like it (even with description for each of them).

Another missing sorting option that blows my mind is sorting issue tags.

I find it hard to quickly search Issues tags when they are in no specific order. I would settle for letting me drag them in an order I want rather than order they were created.

A lot of these solutions sound very complex. Sorting, tags, categories, grid, trees...

How about just showing my repos that I starred at the top? Or if you want to get slightly more complex, a "Feature" button similar to "Star."

i have almost 40 repositories. many private (because i don't want them to muddy up my Github image). a single boolean "featured" is terribly insufficient. tagging would be fantastic.

When I login to github, the repos I've "contributed" to (not even checkin code, but comment on) are on top, while my own are below the fold. What gives? I just wanna access my own repo.

In the last paragraph OP writes "I implore you to allow us to sort our own repos. I know that there are mixed feelings about Windows 8's tile layout for their start menu, but I think that's the sort of thing that we need for project sorting."

Just like they've been grouping projects on their explore pages -- https://github.com/explore -- I would love to see this functionality availble to users to sort repos on their own profile pages as well.

This thought literally just occurred to me yesterday when I was looking at the famo.us repo.

what would be cool would be if each one could create their own views/rankings of anyone's public repo.

A note on the dot-files... would you consider putting your dot files/configration files in a project like mine:

http://configr.io

The project is pretty old, but I started it with the assumption that maybe dot files (that are OK being in the public domain) shouldn't be on github in the first place.

I never did get github integration working, and the site is very basic, but I would love some opinions on it

With more and more companies using your GitHub page as a resume of sorts, this kind of customization is becoming a necessary requirement.

Maybe my repos are a bit more popular (they're connected to a blog I write), but I've noticed that my best repos get pushed to the top by how often others star them.

Still, couldn't you use the username.github.io to feature your repos? Or at least have a prominent link from a github profile to that page?

And please let me sort by mtime when viewing files/dirs in the "tree view mode."

Especially for projects that use some form of "git submodule" and their modules appear top-level in the github page (or other sites for that matter)

Sorting by date is a nice way to see what is being worked on and what has not been touched in a while. Especially for projects that have a hundreds of plugins/translators/widgets in individual files. There is not even an easy way to do it on the command line, so those relative dates on the right hand column just taunt me .

So desperately want a way to sort repos other than by most recent commit time. I think I'd give a toe for this.

Needs to be a sort selected for others to view when they look at my or my organisations' repo list.

Or you can also have a website where you do that

As other folks have mentioned, the issue is that many people looking to hire just look at your GitHub page and your repo list.

As someone you hires too, I do that, but also look at the website if there is any.

I completely agree with this. It has bothered me for a long time that I cannot sort my own projects by what I think is important.

if you only have 1 repository with more than 10 stars, sorting your work seems a like a premature optimization.

Employers aren't going to judge a project based on how many stars it has, that's the exact issue this is trying to address. One of the projects I am most proud of has no stars. Popularity has little bearing on how well designed or elegant a piece of code it.

i'll agree that in order for Github to become the personal CV (and it should!), it needs to account for all use cases (ie. profiles without any popular repositories).

but, as a hiring manager, i don't use Github as a measure for competence. i use Github as a measure for involvement in the open source community (competence usually comes incidentally).

having 30 projects with 0 stars does not really do anything for me that a single code sample through email could not. no matter how you categorize them.

Yes! GitHub, over here! We really want this! Please! ... And thank you!

Completely unrelated, but I couldn't stop laughing when I finished reading the article and saw "David Gay" as the post author at the bottom. Every time he introduces himself, reactions might range from hilarity to anger.

Good for him to live with the pride of his ancestors and not changing his last name. Probably why the domain is oddshocks.com instead of his full name; I see it easily ending up on the wrong side of a NSFW-filter.

While I understand why folks voted this down, but it made me laugh. :) I never thought about the NSFW filter, but I believe domains that fit my full name were taken when I registered the domain.

When I was a little kid, my last name was a problem because of the times I grew up in, but nowadays it only leads to hilarity. Plus it's short and easy to spell. ;)

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