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by codyb 4681 days ago
As someone currently looking for an entry level position in development work I agree with this. Currently I'm learning about cryptography and web security. There's not a lot of development work from that I can put on my github account. Especially since Matasano's Cryptography challenges which I've been slowly working through don't allow me to publicly display the challenges or my results. Does that mean I don't have as much drive as someone who's working on machine learning currently and can write a library and post it on github?
1 comments

Getting active on GitHub was important to me after interviewing last year at a couple of great places. I learned I was out of sync with the developers I wanted to work with. So I got more active on GitHub by sharing code I created which I thought was useful to others. And when I used other libraries I looked for ways I could improve on them and managed to get some Pull Requests accepted. There were lots of benefits. One great benefit is regularly reading code written by developers with more experience than you. And if you form relationships with these same developers and they start coaching through changes on their projects you can accelerate your learning. This work csn even lead to a job. Being active on GitHub is a distinct advantage for sure.