[justinlau]

I disagree with the push for newbies to overshare on Github. Some of the code I wrote when I was learning how to program in middle school was completely awful. I'm pretty happy that it's not used as a representative sample of what I am capable of today.

It's one thing for a recruiter to say "hey, I saw you have a GitHub account..." It's quite another when the recruiter forwards your profile to a seasoned engineer and they make a DailyWTF post out of your code!

Also - you've received offers out of the blue, do you mean offers to interview, or offers to just join the company w/o interviewing?

[meltingice]

I can see where you're coming from, and on one hand I agree because I like to keep a tidy profile, however I think it shows great character to see improvement in code over time.

I would assume that your poorly coded projects haven't been updated in some time, so they will likely be much further down on your Github profile. If you have much more mature projects to compare those old crappy projects against, it shows a real passion for learning, which is massively important to a recruiter.

Also: I added a clarification to the blog post at the end regarding your question.

[MaxGabriel]

You can delete repos of poor code

[justinlau]

It's not the old code that I'm talking about, it's more like newbie programmers not being fully aware of their limitations. They might put up code that they think is hot shit but is actually laughable to experienced people.

Or maybe that's a good thing - it helps prevent potentially bad hiring situations from happening?