Your Profile as a Portfolio
Your GitHub account is a public page, and people considering hiring you will open it. It is worth ten minutes of attention and considerably less anxiety than the internet suggests.
This page is deliberately honest about which parts matter and which do not, because the ones that do not are the ones beginners worry about most.
What people actually look at
Three things, in about a minute: your pinned repositories, whether those repositories have READMEs, and whether the commit history looks like a person working rather than one enormous upload called "initial commit".
That is roughly it. Nobody reads your code line by line at this stage. They are checking whether you have built something and whether you can explain it.
Pinning and describing
GitHub lets you pin up to six repositories to the top of your profile. Choose deliberately, and choose few.
One small finished project with a good README beats four abandoned ones. Give each pinned repository a one-line description and make sure the README answers the four questions from earlier in this chapter. A pinned repository with no README is worse than not pinning it, because it invites someone to look and then gives them nothing.
The contribution graph, honestly
The grid of green squares records activity on GitHub. It does not record skill, employability, or work you did anywhere else — and a great deal of professional work happens on private repositories and other hosts, where it leaves no mark at all.
Optimizing it is a waste of a life. Committing daily to keep a streak produces noise commits, which read badly to anyone who opens the log — which is a person, unlike the graph.
This is worth saying plainly because beginners feel real pressure about those squares, and the pressure is misplaced. An empty week means you had a week. It is not evidence of anything.
The profile README
Create a public repository named exactly after your username and GitHub displays its README at the top of your profile. Who you are, what you are learning, how to reach you — three short paragraphs. A private repository of the same name does nothing at all, silently, which is a confusing ten minutes if you do not know to check.
It is optional and it is pleasant. Skip it if you would rather; nobody has ever been turned down for not having one.
What actually helps
One project you can talk about for ten minutes. A couple of merged contributions to tools you genuinely use. Commit messages a stranger can read. That is the list, and every item on it is something this book has already put in your hands.
On Sandpiper: it is pinned, it has a README, an MIT licence, a history that reads as a series of decisions, and a merged pull request from Theo. That is a genuine portfolio piece, and it exists because you finished a course rather than because you set out to build a portfolio.
- "An empty contribution graph means I am not employable." It means you have not pushed publicly. Most professional work is private, and the graph never sees it.
- "I should commit daily to keep a streak going." Streak commits are noise commits, and they read badly to the humans who open the log.
- "My projects are too small to show." A small, finished, documented project is more persuasive than an ambitious abandoned one. Reviewers read the README first and the code second, if at all.
- "More pinned repositories is better." Two good ones beat six weak ones. Every pinned repository is an invitation to look, and an empty one is an invitation you should not have sent.
- Most readers of this book are learning to code in order to work, and this is where the habits from the previous eight chapters become visible to somebody else.
- Naming the contribution-graph anxiety and dismissing it saves real time and real stress, and it prevents a genuinely bad habit forming.
- "One project you can talk about for ten minutes" is a far more useful target than any number of repositories, and it is achievable with the work you have already done.
Knowledge Check
What does the contribution graph actually measure?
- Activity on GitHub, which is a small and uneven slice of anyone's work
- How much code you have written across every project you have worked on
- How consistently you work, which is what employers are actually assessing
- The quality of your commits, weighted by how large each change was
What is the strongest thing to pin on your profile?
- One small finished project with a README that actually explains what it is
- Six repositories, so that the profile looks active and varied to a visitor
- The largest project you have worked on, whatever state it is currently in
- A repository containing your notes from every course you have completed
Why does this topic warn against committing daily to keep a streak?
- Because streak commits are noise, and it is humans who read the log
- Because GitHub detects artificial streaks and removes them from the graph
- Because daily commits are only counted on repositories that are public
- Because frequent small commits make a repository slower to clone
What does this topic say actually helps when someone is looking at your work?
- A project you can talk about for ten minutes, and a merged contribution or two
- A large number of repositories, showing breadth across many technologies
- A profile README with a detailed list of every skill you have acquired
- A perfect contribution graph with no gaps over the previous twelve months
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