Resume Tip: Link to yoursite/github, not github.com/you

2022 UPDATE: Another added bonus is that you can verify links to your own site on Mastodon. I don’t think it’s possible to add the verification to GitHub.com.

2021 UPDATE: I revisited this recently in my post Use GitHub Profile Pages to Mirror Your Personal Site. Be sure to read that too.

Original

I look at dozens of tech resumes and StackOverflow Careers profiles a day and I’m glad that more of them have GitHub links with some code to look at. In 2011, I wrote that I thought tech applicant assessment should be more portfolio based. I described what I would be looking for as an interviewer — one point was:

I could use an orientation: I need a starting place. The bigger the project, the harder it will be to jump in and take a look around. Give me what you’d give a new contributor.

Now that I’ve been spending time in GitHub with the intent of understanding a developer, I can see that I need an overview of the whole repository. GitHub’s public profile isn’t customizable and doesn’t do a good job of describing a person’s contributions.

I recommend:

  1. Create a page with a simple URL on your own domain (e.g. example.com/github) and write a narrative that takes me through your repositories.
  2. Link to that page in your resume and in your GitHub profile.

What exactly you do on this page really depends on your specific contributions and what kinds of jobs you are applying to. I made a GitHub tour page to dogfood my own suggestion, but also because, as a consultant, I imagine that some prospective clients look at my GitHub. I decided that a reasonable organization of my page was (approximate) reverse chronological order, but that might not be right for you. If you have a particularly popular project, you probably want that at the top. If you are looking to get a job in a specific technology, you should highlight contributions using it. Most importantly, edit the list down to what someone should look at.

Another benefit of this page is that I can mix-in the non-open source parts of projects. For example, App-o-Mat is not open source, but the app template is, so I can highlight a project that you can’t even see very well on my personal GitHub page. I can also describe a contribution where the code isn’t very interesting, but context is.

Whatever your contributions, I am sure that your own organization of them will be a lot better than GitHub’s default.

UPDATE: I revisited this recently in my post Use GitHub Profile Pages to Mirror Your Personal Site. Be sure to read that too.