Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Life as a GitHub Intern: What laser cutting taught me about contribution graphs

blog.github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 42 posts

Re: Life as a GitHub Intern: What laser cutting taught me about contribution graphs

#21

Post by celticninja »

tmpz22 wrote: post #3
Shank wrote: post #2

I feel like there's a lot of untapped potential in GitHub's profile system, and this is a good example of it. The contribution graph looks pretty -- but what if it could be a souvenir? A lot of programming projects are hard to quantify in terms of success -- besides shipping the product, it's hard to see visible signs of bug reporting, refactoring, etc. I'd love to see GitHub selling physical tokens that measure this…

I'd hate to see github turned into LinkedIn or some other recruiting system that sells profile information in exchange for personal validation. Merit systems are also easily gamed or warped to fit the cultural narrative, for boot licking, sabotage - it is not Github's core business and they should stay out of it (IMO).

I hate to break it to you but GitHub is already used as a recruiting tool.

Re: Life as a GitHub Intern: What laser cutting taught me about contribution graphs

#22

Post by KenanSulayman »

ISL wrote: post #4

An aside: the contribution graph can be gamed: https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti

You don't need something like gitfiti.

Just use the date parameter of the git commit command: git commit --date "Foo Jan 1 00:00:01 CEST 2011" -m "What".

Re: Life as a GitHub Intern: What laser cutting taught me about contribution graphs

#23

Post by fake-name »

paulie_a wrote: post #10
BoysenberryPi wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github is already essentially Linkedin for developers.

Except GitHub doesn't steal your contact list and then send fraudulent notifications to them like LinkedIn does.

Well, github doesn't.

I have had assholes scrape my commits for the commit e-mail address, and spam me already.

Give it time.

Re: Life as a GitHub Intern: What laser cutting taught me about contribution graphs

#24

Post by dvtrn »

hueving wrote: post #12
BoysenberryPi wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github is already essentially Linkedin for developers.

Maybe for junior devs to get their foot in the door, but not for any higher level positions. You can't tell very much about someone's engineering skills based on some public commits to a side project and very few people (<1%) are writing open source professionally.

I wished more recruiters got this. The bulk of many professional's work i would imagine is deemed proprietary company property and not everyone really has the life that affords them the time to commit frequently to someone else's pet project repository because we have kids and families that soak up that time.

"Do you have a GitHub profile?" Is a question thats making me raise an eyebrow more and more lately, what if I don't? What's that say about me that I'm not constantly constantly distributing my code to everyone else via public repositories?

Yes I have a github profile but all you're going to find is a Jekyll site where I blog about model airplanes and geek off about air traffic control chatter. Doubt that's very interesting content for a guy who works in fintech

Re: Life as a GitHub Intern: What laser cutting taught me about contribution graphs

#25

Post by MaulingMonkey »

fake-name wrote: post #23
paulie_a wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except GitHub doesn't steal your contact list and then send fraudulent notifications to them like LinkedIn does.

Well, github doesn't. I have had assholes scrape my commits for the commit e-mail address, and spam me already. Give it time.

Happened to me too. Told me to email them back to "unsubscribe", which of course didn't work. They train my spam filters now.

Re: Life as a GitHub Intern: What laser cutting taught me about contribution graphs

#26

Post by palferrari »

palferrari wrote: post #14

https://github.com/ryanml/Github-Game-of-Life Something fun I did with the contribution graph a couple of years ago. Lets you play Conway's Game of Life (sort of) with the graph. More crowded contribution graphs make for slightly less interesting generations. You can enable/disable cells if you'd like.

I realize that the code for this is far from fantastic... One of these days I am sure I will get around to refactoring it :-)

Re: Life as a GitHub Intern: What laser cutting taught me about contribution graphs

#28

Post by kakwa_ »

Shank wrote: post #2

I feel like there's a lot of untapped potential in GitHub's profile system, and this is a good example of it. The contribution graph looks pretty -- but what if it could be a souvenir? A lot of programming projects are hard to quantify in terms of success -- besides shipping the product, it's hard to see visible signs of bug reporting, refactoring, etc. I'd love to see GitHub selling physical tokens that measure this…

> I feel like there's a lot of untapped potential in GitHub's profile system

I'm a bit sad they removed the "punch card" in the projects statistic.

This was a great tool to see if a project was a side project from a lone individual or something with people paid to work on it daily from 9am to 6pm.

(I tend to prefer the second in my choice of dependencies, because there are less likely to be abandoned).

Re: Life as a GitHub Intern: What laser cutting taught me about contribution graphs

#29

Post by gear54rus »

dvtrn wrote: post #24
hueving wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe for junior devs to get their foot in the door, but not for any higher level positions. You can't tell very much about someone's engineering skills based on some public commits to a side project and very few people (<1%) are writing open source professionally.

I wished more recruiters got this. The bulk of many professional's work i would imagine is deemed proprietary company property and not everyone really has the life that affords them the time to commit frequently to someone else's pet project repository because we have kids and families that soak up that time. "Do you have a GitHub profile?" Is a question thats making me raise an eyebrow more and more lately, what if…

> what if I don't?

god I hope this is exaggerated lol.

Filthy recruiter, how can they even ask such a question. How dare they ask whether I make tech world better outside my job. Muh keeds, muh family.

> my code

The one that is built on titanic effort of others not all of which was compensated in any way at all?

Re: Life as a GitHub Intern: What laser cutting taught me about contribution graphs

#30

Post by fyfy18 »

dvtrn wrote: post #24
hueving wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe for junior devs to get their foot in the door, but not for any higher level positions. You can't tell very much about someone's engineering skills based on some public commits to a side project and very few people (<1%) are writing open source professionally.

I wished more recruiters got this. The bulk of many professional's work i would imagine is deemed proprietary company property and not everyone really has the life that affords them the time to commit frequently to someone else's pet project repository because we have kids and families that soak up that time. "Do you have a GitHub profile?" Is a question thats making me raise an eyebrow more and more lately, what if…

As someone who has been in charge of recruiting developers, one of the hardest parts is deciding if someone is really any good. Your CV and who you’ve worked for doesn’t really say anything, even after chatting to you I don’t know whether the code you are writing is going to be good or not.

So I can either get you to do a coding excercise (but who has time for that, especially when you may have three other offers already) or I can ask for a sample of your code. When I ask candidates if they have a GitHub profile, I ask because that’s where most people have samples of code they’ve worked on. If you don’t, just tell me and send me a zip of some code so I can see how you actually write code.

If you don’t even have that, well sorry, but I’m getting plenty of CVs through everyday.

It also works the other way, maybe you aren’t good at interviews but you know you are a good developer. List on your CV some of your interesting projects with GitHub links (or put “code available on request”).

Post reply on HN