[prakhunov]

Like other people in this thread have said, I definitely look for projects or contributions that look interesting, or are job related, to start out having a conversation.

However, there is one thing I look for that will, usually, be a huge negative against the candidate. I have run into many candidates where their github projects are just 100% clones of various tutorials. When a github profile is only full of such projects it doesn't tell me anything different than what is on your resume, and my trust in the candidate goes down.

Other than looking at code quality, I actually look into their commit history and see if they are using the various best practices of git.