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

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

thehftguy.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 89 posts

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

#51

Post by tschellenbach »

This doesn't make any sense, as an interviewer I will definitely read your code on Github. It's a great way to get a sense of how someone writes code without having to ask for a time consuming assignment.

If you have a popular open source library on your github thats a huge plus. It shows that you've mastered quite a few different skills. From documentation, to promotion, ease of use, testing, accepting contributions, review etc.

But even if it's just a 1 star repo, it at least gives an overview of your code quality and style.

PS. we're hiring https://angel.co/stream/jobs

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

#52

Post by paradite »

MaxLeiter wrote: post #47
paradite wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fantastic profile for someone still in high school! One unsolicited suggestion: You can fetch the number of stars of each repo to showcase the their significance, recruiters are more attracted to quantified numbers.

Thanks. I was thinking about that but really enjoy not requiring JavaScript, however maybe its worth it. I'll try it out

Actually you can write a Node.js script that fetches and generates the static html to display the repo stars, so the website itself won't load any JS. You just need to run the script once in a while.

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

#53

Post by mixmastamyk »

__s wrote: post #15

I definitely make this mistake. I have a handfull of maintained projects, but nearing 100 repos, most without readmes, many are just random ideas The last time I interviewed the technical interviewer actually had me go over my openEtG project, & dive into the guts of the AI's eval. They also stumbled upon https://github.com/serprex/brainwebfuckassembly which ended up having a profanity filled interview They started t…

Steve McConnell's Code Complete can help with the clean code part. Read it and jot down some notes.

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

#54

Post by mnutt »

Often when I see candidates' github accounts they are mostly forked repos with no changes and projects with rails scaffolding. There might be something there but it's really hard to dig through and find. I would suggest candidates build their own projects using documented pull requests and point the hiring manager to the closed PR page of their project. Or even better, point them to a substantial PR they completed on someone else's open source project.

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

#55

Post by ibejoeb »

funkaster wrote: post #33

> Conclusion: Noone cares about GitHub. Noone is gonna read it. Everyone is gonna ask for it nonetheless, cause it’s hype. True. We don't ask for GitHub links because they are pointless from a screening perspective. I'm happy to talk about them during an interview, but if I see a github link in a CV, there's little chance I will visit it. (Source: I'm a hiring manager at a tech company, have been in a similar positio…

>I would have no time at all to do anything if I start looking at all my candidates' github links.

How do you decide to get the candidate in the pipeline? Presumably you're reading a CV and a letter, then having a phone call, etc. You don't think it would add context and clarity if you took 20 minutes from those activities and devoted them to examining a specimen?

Do you do whiteboard interviews? I've never done one less than an hour, and I think you'd be able to glean quite a bit of the same information by looking through the log.

Do you do homework? Who examines it? Could you not get similar perspective from looking at contributions on GitHub?

>I would be more than happy to look at a portfolio showing products built by them

To me, a candidate that has full-blown products out there is fast-tracked.

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

#56

Post by reboog711 »

nawitus wrote: post #2

"Nobody cares about your code" That's a peculiar claim about people who hire employees to create code. "It’s not the code that counts, it’s the product" So is everyone only hiring programmers who write code which can be sloppy and full of technical debt and impossible maintain, as long as the product works okay for now?

> So is everyone only hiring programmers who write code which can be sloppy and full of technical debt and impossible maintain, as long as the product works okay for now?

My experience says yes. The people hiring programmers usually have no ability to validate a programmer's skill. The only thing they care about is a working application that solves a business problem.

The bulk of code I come across as a consultant is "sloppy and full of technical debt". There are various reasons for it, not all of them reflect on the programmer.

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

#57

Post by motet_a »

> There is one project structure to rule them all. There MUST be separate directories for source, test, libraries, compiled binaries, etc…

I don’t think so. Look at the Git sources (https://github.com/git/git). Most of the C source files are in the top directory.

Some other people like to write unit test in the same directories as the source files, by adding a `.test` suffix to each source file name.

Some other people like to embed unit tests in source files, “à la” Rust.

There is no One True rule. Not organizing things the way you do is not necessarily bad.

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

#58

Post by acidus »

cjcenizal wrote: post #38
B73kkww wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often see an inverse correlation between being able to "talk about code" and actually producing good code. 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 be…

I think there's a correlation between being able to explain something and fully understanding it. Being able to think clearly and communicate clearly are interconnected -- if you're programming by instinct then you're not thinking critically about the problems you're solving.

And how can you get better at it?

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

#59

Post by orange_bear »

I have a problem with this. I spent several years reading other people's code and maintaining it. If I was hiring a coder and their resume directed me to their one github project, I would absolutely go read over the code (or "decode" it as the author describes), to see what I'm working with. Of course, I am a coder and not a manager. The author promotes writing bad code and then says that it is time-consuming and difficult to read ("decode") the code, which sounds to me like the author just is not an experienced programmer - or at least, it appears that way. I think those ideas are toxic. Your example code should be something that another coder can dive into and work with easily. Programmers interviewing you WILL likely look at the code for readability. For example, we had an intern who wrote all of his C code in header files. All of it. If your project looks like that, I'm not hiring you.
Post reply on HN