[zecho]

I hear this quite often about Github and it's a bit disturbing to me. If I heard an editor judge an author's work based on what that author posts to twitter, I'd be horrified.

I can't be the only person on Github that uses it primarily as a junk drawer full of bad implementations and abandoned "projects" that were more quick and dirty personal itches. Sometimes I'll contribute to random OSS, but the vast majority of GH for me is just a place to store random ideas, many of which were just toying around with some new tool or whatever and would never see the light of day in production without given much more thought.

Honestly, if you want to see code samples, you're probably better off watching the person work through a problem. Give prospective hires a project. Whether its as simple as fizzbuzz or as difficult as a trial week is up to you, I suppose.

[jared314]

> If I heard an editor judge an author's work based on what that author posts to twitter, I'd be horrified.

And yet, many potential hires are judged by their facebook posts[1,2], tweets, blog entries, and anything that can be found in a google search. All of this amounts to methods of elimination. You can treat it like a portfolio, but an active github account is just a cheap way to filter out possible negatives.

It is also good to mention that, unlike writers, a lot of programmers cannot show their previous work, because it is the private property of their current/previous employer.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/03/05/facebook-...

[2] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/01/password-protected-...

[nukerhazz]

This is why I use Bitbucket, with its unlimited private repos, for that junk drawer. I can keep my throwaways and false starts private.

[hardwaresofton]

Very true - I use Assembla!

[ibudiallo]

I think a stackoverflow page would be much more valuable. Just looking at how a person answers a question tells a lot more than the code they forked or abandoned.

[cgore]

I think judging an author from their tweets is a horrible idea, but what about their blog? That seems reasonable. If anything, the average 'technical' interview is closer to the Twitter idea, with lots of code golf questions, but you can see what a person can really do and really likes to do on Github.

[bdcravens]

I don't think you're necessarily judged by the quality of your Github code as much as the fact that you have Github code. Especially if it's a bit out of your normal box.

[tieTYT]

Yeah I agree this is pretty scary. Two of my clojure projects on github are from when I was learning the language. I'm much better at clojure now, but the public facing code is junk because I was in proof of concept mode, not fluent, idiomatic mode.

I'm torn. Do I leave it up there to show that I enjoy learning new technology in my free time, or do I take it down because it's not coded in the professional quality I hold myself to at work?

[philangist]

Leave it up.I think the fact that you're the type of developer who goes out of his/her way to learn Clojure trumps the fact that it might not be the highest standard code.

[3pt14159]

I agree with philangist. 99.9% of people that apply for web dev jobs don't have clojure experience. Worst case scenario put it in the README that these were projects from your early understanding of Clojure.