Chapter 16
IN THIS CHAPTER
Making the most of your profile
Understanding your contribution graph
Following people and starring repositories
GitHub is often described as a social network for developers. Throughout this book, we show you that GitHub is much more than a social network. It’s an essential set of tools for working on code together. Even so, the social network aspect is still an important part of GitHub. It may well be a key reason for its success. When GitHub was created, there were existing source control hosts. Pretty much all these hosts were focused around projects. GitHub turned this project-focus approach on its head and made people the focus. You can see it in the URL structure where every repository has the name of the user or organization before the repository name.
In this chapter, we dig into the social network aspect of GitHub. We look at how you represent yourself in this network and how you can get involved in the online community.
Every user on GitHub has a profile page. Figure 16-1 shows the profile for one of the authors of this book at https://github.com/haacked
.
Your profile page represents you on GitHub. When you open an issue or submit a pull request to a new repository, the maintainers are likely to take a look at your profile to get a sense of you.
Not only that, your GitHub profile can serve as a portfolio of your development work. It provides some insight into your interests, experience, and ability as a software developer. Many companies who are hiring will take a look at your GitHub profile.
The first thing people visiting your profile will notice is your profile picture. This pic is associated with all your activity on GitHub. When you create an issue or a pull request or leave a comment, your profile pic is right there next to it.
Under your profile pic is a status message you can use to communicate something about yourself to the entire community. For some, it is an outlet to say something funny or meaningful. But for others, it’s used for practical purposes. For example, if you’re a maintainer of a popular project, you may want to let the world that you’re busy if you plan to be away from GitHub for a while. That sets the expectation that you may be slow to respond to new issues. Click your status message to bring up the option to change it. Figure 16-2 shows the status message dialog box with a busy message specified.
GitHub displays your bio and information that you choose to show the world under the status message. Click the Edit button to change your bio, company name, location, and URL. This area is a good opportunity to tell the world a bit more about yourself and link to your personal blog or website.
In this section, you also sometimes find badges that GitHub will add to users’ profile. For example, in Figure 15-1, you can see that Haacked has the Pro badge. Haacked is definitely a pro GitHub user, but that’s not what that badge means. A Pro badge on a GitHub profile just means that that user pays for the individual Pro subscription. (You can see different pricing models at https://github.com/pricing
.) Another badge you may often see is the Staff badge. This badge is reserved for full-time employees at GitHub (also called Hubbers). Figure 16-3 shows meaghanlewis’s profile with the staff badge. Meaghan happens to be the technical reviewer for this book and is an engineering manager at GitHub!
By default, GitHub shows a selection of your most popular repositories on your profile page, but those repositories may not represent what’s important to you. Click Customize your pinned repositories to select up to six repositories to pin to your profile page.
Pinned repositories can be useful from three perspectives:
The contribution graph is a grid of squares 7 squares high and 52 squares in length representing each day of the past year. Each square is filled in with a color that represents your contribution level on that day. If you didn’t make any contributions, the square remains gray. If you made some contributions, the square ranges from light green to dark green, depending on how many contributions you made.
Issues and pull requests count as contributions on standalone repositories. Commits to a standalone repository’s default branch (typically master
) or to its GitHub pages branch (typically gh-pages
) count toward your contribution graph.
The contribution graph is one of GitHub’s more controversial features. Two common concerns are raised. The first is that it promotes unhealthy behavior in that many people attempt to keep long streaks of activity going. Many people take pride in having activity on every single day of their graph, even weekends. Though you may be working on something that makes you happy on the weekends, which is okay, it’s also very important to recognize that it’s not — and shouldn’t be — expected that you are coding every single day of your life. Some of the most important aha! moments have come from taking a break and gaining a new perspective.
The other concern is that other people draw bad conclusions about a person’s ability as a developer based on the activity graph. For example, someone may look at a developer’s contribution graph, see very little activity, and conclude that he’s not very productive.
Also, contributions to private repositories may not be showing up in a contribution graph. Click Contribution settings to change that setting. Figure 16-4 shows an example of both enabling the display of private contributions as well as an activity graph.
Unlike the contribution graph, which shows how much activity you have, the activity graph shows where your activity occurs. As you can see in Figure 16-4, one of the authors of this book has most of his activity in commits and pull requests.
Underneath the contribution graph (not shown in Figure 16-1) is the contribution activity timeline. This timeline of your activity on GitHub goes all the way back to your first commit. It can be nostalgic to go back to the beginning of your activity.
On your profile page, click the Stars tab to see a list of all the repositories that you’ve starred. This list is viewable by others who happen upon your profile page. Exploring the repositories others have starred is a great way of discovering interesting new projects.
When you visit the GitHub profile of another user, a big Follow button appears underneath the profile picture. Click the Follow button to subscribe to notifications about the user’s activity in your dashboard at https://github.com
. Who you follow also feeds into GitHub’s recommendation system. For example, if someone you follow stars a public repository, that repository may show up in the Discover repositories section of your dashboard as a recommendation.
You can see all the users you follow by clicking the Following tab of your home page. You can see all the people that follow you by clicking the Followers tab.
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