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Sage Elliott
Sage Elliott
30,003 Points
Posted by Sage Elliott
Sage Elliott
30,003 Points

Github | What to commit?

Hello. Being new to github I am curious what kind of stuff would be appropriate to commit to it. For example: I have several projects I want to build for myself from scratch, like a custom portfolio with cool effects and selection tools, a blog made from Ruby on Rails, etc...

Are these kind of things good to do for potential employers to see your code?

I'm sure there are many resources out there for me to read up on it, but I also wanted to get the opinion/experience of any treehouse members.

Thank you for your time!

2 Answers

James Andrews
James Andrews
7,245 Points

Github is a good resource for pushing anything and everything you create. The issue is if you push your super secret project to a public repository someone could fork it and steal it. You need to weigh which projects do you want public and viewable by all the world, and which ones you want private. Those that are private can still go to github but you have to pay for use of private repositories and those could add up in cost. I personally only use github for public works, and push my private repositories to my shared hosting account at Mediatemple (which requires a bit more advanced knowledge to do).

Sage Elliott
Sage Elliott
30,003 Points
Sage Elliott
Sage Elliott
30,003 Points

Thanks for your answer, its exactly what I was looking for.

Nicholas Mejia
Nicholas Mejia
23,800 Points
Nicholas Mejia
Nicholas Mejia
23,800 Points

Any of those things are good, but whats important is that these projects be reflective of the best work you can do. I think the best combo is having your personal website have actual live example of the code and use github to give anyone who is interested the ability to view the source or even fork it.

What you should really look into is writing open source. They touched on it a bit in the Git Basics dive but you should really look into contributing. Employers love seeing when you make useful contributions to popular repositories. It shows a certain interest and passion for programming.

Happy forking!

Sage Elliott
Sage Elliott
30,003 Points
Sage Elliott
Sage Elliott
30,003 Points

Thanks! Any tips you may have on how you have found projects to contribute to?

I plan on working a bit more on my own stuff for probably about a month, before I will feel adequate enough to contribute to other peoples work.

Nicholas Mejia
Nicholas Mejia
23,800 Points

Start here:

http://www.lookingforpullrequests.com/

This is one of the resources that Tommy provides at the end of the "Working With Remote Repositories" stage in the extra credit section. There are two other links that are worth checking out as well. You can pick and choose based on things such as languages and descriptions. Definitely useful.