How to present a GitHub project for your resume (2016)

I've done the same, its a classic corporate warfare tactic, there exists an agreed on paper form to standardize the demarcation point between two warring internal groups (and all internal groups are at war because of stack ranked management reviews, formal or otherwise...), someone on the home team was manual data entering that paper form into "something" now you can push that labor cost onto the other side who now do the manual data entry for the home team. For bonus points toss each data entry into a database and provide some manner of weekly reporting via web or email cron job, maybe some dynamic error checking at data entry time. Classic weapon of internal politics. I've made a lot of money off this, historically.

There's a whole universe of MBA companies out there that see computers abstractly as mere fancy electric typewriters, merely a modern Linotype machine, its just a modern mimeograph nothing more, a way to format manual data entry for other humans to read and manually data enter in something else. Computers that don't compute or have flowcharts, merely manual human I/O devices. Adding the slightest bit of automation can blow the minds of business people.

Beware of the inner product effect. A simple web form that emails the ticketing system in restricted cases can eliminate enormous amounts of manual data re-entry if it happens enough, but trying to turn it into a generalized tool will merely result in a "simple web form" that becomes more complicated than the ticketing system everyone was avoiding because it was too complicated for end users. Don't write a feature complete 100% wrapper for JIRA with the expectation it'll be simpler, thats not going to turn out well. Of course in corporate warfare sometimes punishing the other internal department is more important than making things simpler and faster for all, and if it gets your team out of the data entry task and puts them on the data entry task, well, the guy on your team who signs your paychecks is going to be happy with you.

That is not only between persons: I can get myself into a talker's mindset in a couple of days just by reading, drawing diagrams and generally doing anything that increases self confidence.

My actual coding abilities drop in the process because the ability to see abstract graphical patterns decreases.

On my best coding days I'm barely able to utter a coherent sentence at the end of the day.

I could tell you when a sentence had a problem and how to fix it. What I couldn't do was tell you why something was wrong in the language of talking-about-language. Basic parts of speech, sure. Past that I was lost. It took learning a fair bit of French in a formal setting to get that stuff to stick. I think the problem was that I didn't need those words to think about my native language[1]. It just happened for me. Learning a foreign language made it easy to pick up the vocabulary, because I actually needed it to talk about what was going on.

Point being that maybe there's a way to pick up some of the lingo by finding a way to need it. Maybe learn a radically different programming language from what you're used to.

On the other hand I find that even a not-especially-deep understanding of how things actually work makes some of these named concepts and patterns look like really obvious and not-needing-their-own-words cases of some more fundamental thing, so if it's that giving you trouble then I'm not sure what to do about that or how to make you need those words enough to learn them. Some significant percentage of the time I end up re-casting "complex" ideas as an implementation/combination of some simpler or more fundamental thing(s) I already know, which turns out to be an exact match for how the thing actually works and leaves me wondering entirely WTF all the fuss is about, and usually thinking I don't actually understand it long after I in fact do because everyone writing/talking about it is using mysterious, magical language. Being able to communicate with people who prefer to... I don't know, come at problems from the other direction I guess, is a problem I continue to have.

[1] N.b. I would eventually have needed them to develop further, and I picked up some really bad habits in high school that harmed the quality of my writing but helped me make mandatory page counts so I definitely had room to improve.

[EDIT] embarrassing farther/further error. The finer points of usage remain a struggle.