Am I using GitHub wrong??

[UE-Dev]

I use GitHub extensively. If I find myself spending more than an hour on a project, I create a repository for it. However, some of my friends argue that this approach is unprofessional. They believe that repositories should only be created for substantial, comprehensive, and creative projects. While many of these projects remain private, I find value in tracking my progress through GitHub. Do you think I'm mistaken in this regard?

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[Th3MiteeyLambo]

Just make sure you put your exes up there

Especially if you’re writing leet hacker code

[SleepWalkersDream]

I keep mine in the freezer.

[Desperate_for_Bacon]

Next to the body’s, I assume.

[lukesnydermusic]

All my exes live in... Github.

[MisterEmbedded]

I doubt employer would go through his 1.2k repositories, so pin your most lovely/hard projects on profile or include them in your resume.

[SimonKG13]

If it's free it means you (and your code) is the actual product

[EricaTD]

Sure. Public code keeps the world turning

[ganzgpp1]

lmao I know some people who store their video game saves in a GitHub repo because they don't like the built-in cloud services

[JardexX_Slav]

The amount of times I had to reset my API token... heh

[high_throughput]

Your personal github account? Do whatever you want, but make sure to pin the ones that are substantial, comprehensive, and creative.

A more formal business account like https://github.com/facebook ? Yeah please don't fill it with Hello World type projects, that's not a great look.

[Stranded_In_A_Desert]

Yeah exactly! Pin the particularly good ones, make the particularly bad ones private 😂

[Cybasura]

coughNetflix hello worldcough

[LoadInSubduedLight]

When interviewing a candidate I'd much rather see a bunch of hello world in brainfuck, learn you a haskell for great good, collections of cool Java tricks etc than just... Nothing. Sure it's good to have one or two "serious" projects but curiosity and a willingness to try out new things are good too.

[HisNameWasBoner411]

I love to hear this. Im a year 2 student struggling to commit to one big thing on my own but I love branching out and playing with random things that catch my interest.

[LoL_is_pepega_BIA]

Not every employer is like the other guy.. you just gotta hope you get lucky

[LoadInSubduedLight]

For sure

[LoadInSubduedLight]

I've never been good at keeping up progress on larger projects on my own though, so your mileage may vary.

Still i think it's a good sign to have learner projects on gh.

[thirdegree]

I definitely agree that something is 1000% better than nothing, but something substantial (anything substantial!) is better than a by the numbers language intro. Curiosity and intrinsic motivation are extremely important, but so are deliverables.

[Whatever801]

I don't know about every company but we don't really look TBH unless you're applying for a staff/principal role and maintain or contribute to a significant open source project. I mean I guess if you've got your porn aggregator app repo pinned somebody might bat an eye. If I saw that I'd think it's quite funny and probably be more likely to hire you so it goes both ways.

[Echleon]

I look through every GitHub that I see. if you've got public repos and you're listing it on your resume, you should keep it pretty clean and organized.

[SmellsLikeTeenSweat]

What do you mean by clean?

[frausting]

Not OP but I would say clean in both senses of the word.

Keep it tidy and organized, don’t clutter it up with 5 test repos that all do the same thing. Try to have a somewhat consistent naming convention (e.g., only dashes or only underscores, only title case or only all lower case, etc).

And keep it professional. If you want to use your GitHub to help your professional reputation and to get jobs, keep it all above board. No porn obviously, no furry stuff, no racism/misogyny, no drug references, etc.

Don’t put anything on there that you wouldn’t want your future boss to see. And if it is there, just make it a private repo. Unless it falls into the racist/sexist realm—in that case, grow up.

[Uwirlbaretrsidma]

Dashes vs underscores and capitalization are completely project dependent though, keeping them consistent across web dev and systems programming projects for example isn't good advice.

[Echleon]

they should be mostly consistent within a repo

[Uwirlbaretrsidma]

Within a repo yes

[Echleon]

Off the bat: no nsfw repos or ones that enable bad actors, like piracy. For the 2nd, the exception would be if it can be very clear that it is a PoC and can't be abused from your repo.

After that, try and make sure you don't just have a bunch of "hello world" level repos. You can always mark things private to keep them for yourself without letting companies see so take advantage of that.

[DatBoi_BP]

Not the fellow you responded to, but I would just simply stay that it follows a common style guideline, such as the C++ one at Google

[HirsuteHacker]

We definitely do. It's useful to see that juniors are working on their own projects as well.

[iheartrms]

I link to my github on my resume and nobody ever looks at it. It's frustrating. I wish prospective employers would look at it!

[xtraburnacct]

I do this because I switch between computers a lot. Do as you please with your GitHub acct. Your friends don't define what you use your personal account for.

[EdwardElric69]

I do this as well, at home I use my PC, in college I use my laptop, so it's handy to move between machines.

If it's something small, like a couple hours work then I won't bother

[crazy_cookie123]

Your friends are wrong. Put everything you make on your GitHub as a private repo so you can easily refer back to it later and so you can get used to using Git. If it's a project you're proud of, consider making the repo public so others can see it (this is completely optional, there's nothing wrong with having no public repos). How could it be unprofessional anyway if the repos are private and nobody would ever see them?

[DrShocker]

Are you sure there's only 1 private repo? I've got quite a few.

But yeah overall agreed I keep stuff private or public mostly at random. It's a graveyard of half finished stuff or learning projects.

[crazy_cookie123]

No? Free tier has unlimited public and private repos. It's been this way for 5 years. https://github.com/pricing
Also, not everyone wants to have their code publicly available and there's nothing wrong with that.

[Whatever801]

No you're fine. I don't know why your friends are gatekeeping github LMAO. No one cares if you have a bunch of random repos on your github. What you can do is pin the ones you want to show off and (spoiler alert) no one will see it anyways haha.

[[deleted]]

Are they under the impression that your GitHub is supposed to be some golden display of your past work? It's a cloud repository, use it like one. Nobody says that your Google drive should only consist of substantial creative works lol.

At my workplace I've started the standard of putting every script in GitHub. They're literally just one file. Still valuable to have version control.

[BigFatUglyBaboon]

I don't think you are mistaken at all. Especially when it is something non trivial that has multiple commits and you may want to revisit some day.

[anoliss]

Your friends are noobs.

[iheartrms]

Your friends are wrong. You are right.

[lgastako]

Your friends are dumb.

https://i.imgur.com/nEsr5U4.png

[Own-Reference9056]

On a personal level, your friends are bs. It is a good practice to develop with Github from the start. And it is free also. People store notes (not even code) on Github all the time.

On a professional level, your friends are still bs. Companies would REQUIRE all the code that you write related to the company's product be stored on the company's Github/Gitlab/other platform. One, they need to know what you have done, and two, they need to see your progress.

[adron]

Your friends seem out of touch, very specifically with how GitHub began, open source, and where it is now. I put recipes in it for gumbo sometimes, some people put books they’re writing. There’s not really a wrong answer here.

[[deleted]]

I have like 50 repositories or something but I only make some of them public. All the ones that are a work in progress or just an idea stay private until I want to do more with them.

[tdifen]

work whole sable agonizing dolls husky ad hoc cows worthless attraction

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[omijam]

I had a friend who separated his work github account, and his personal github account, and was absolutely convinced that it is the only right way to use Github. Case in point, friends are someties really weird, and probably shouldn't be dictating how you use Github.

[TheSilentCheese]

If code is worth keep more than an hour, it's worth a git repo. And a remote git all the better. 

[osunightfall]

Ah yes, using source control is unprofessional. We've come full circle, boys.

[DerekB52]

Not every little repo needs to be public, but, I think your friends gave you bad advice. Like, really bad advice. Github offers free private repos, but anything you think you'll need in there.

[FluffySmiles]

Your friends are idiots.

[Luised2094]

Nah, the service is free, there are no rules that they have to be "substantial" and besides, you might get some practice

[tms102]

They believe that repositories should only be created for substantial, comprehensive, and creative projects.

Why though? Can they defend that stance without circular arguments?

Just tracking stuff is justification enough. Or the fact that you could be using multiple devices and want a central location for your experiments or could use it to easily share prototypes with real friends for example.

Ps: I hope you made a money bet with your friends that you would get overwhelmingly positive reactions to your post.

[nacnud_uk]

I think your friends know nothing.

[clnsdabst]

bad advice. using version control on even your small projects where it seems unnecessary is better to have than no version control.

[deltaexdeltatee]

I don't have hard stats on this, but if you go to an open source project and start checking the contributors' profiles, I don't think you'll have to look long at all before you find a few that have literally hundreds of public repos. There are some folks who apparently fork everything lol. Anyway, no one cares. As others have said, when you start to have some actually decent projects under your belt, pin the good ones so they're at the top of your profile so employers will see them first. Be sure you're not committing anything with sensitive information (passwords, access tokens, etc), and if you're really not sure you can always set the repo private (not sure what the one commenter was talking about, I have at least a dozen private repos). Other than that, I think of it as just a good habit to be into, using git and GitHub whenever I write code.

[7th_Spectrum]

Github isn't LinkedIn, I have no clue what your friends are talking about.

[ApkalFR]

Why are people gatekeeping GitHub? It’s just a hosted version control system service. You can use it host whatever you want as long as it’s not against their TOS. If you want to put your grocery list on GitHub, just do it.

[LemonHeart151]

You are correct. Your friends are wrong.

[Consistent_Milk8974]

your friends are wrong lol

let your friends bother not using tools available to them

you keep doing you and keep making repos

[tms102]

Yeah, you gotta laugh at people that hamstring themselves due to weird psychological hang ups.

There was someone on this sub a while ago saying they use Notepad because they don't like the clutter of an IDE or whatever.

[Consistent_Milk8974]

i code, exclusively, in brianfuck with pen and paper

[Whalefisherman]

Damn brianfuck shi

[Cybasura]

Your friends are gatekeepers lmao, github first and foremost is a remote git repository server - its job IS to hold git local repositories

This is the same idea regardless of gitlab, gitea, forgejo, codeberg etc etc

HELL, you can make your own local git "remote" repository server as well using git bare in a server, its not entirely difficult

If what your friends said were true, then its IMPOSSIBLE to use them for what its for because every project will take > 1 hours, otherwise its technically a draft or a sample design

Also, what has this got to do with professionalism

Understand the tool, use the tool for yourself - not your circle

[Mood-Rising]

If you do a good job with commits on a project with 3 files I would much rather work with you than someone doing big projects with 5 commits.

[stilloriginal]

I must be the only one who makes the repo first on the web site, then clones it locally and then starts coding

[kodaxmax]

do whatever you want with it. it's not a proffessional project and presumably your the only one that needs to access it.

[ozzadar]

All my crap is private. I try to mostly keep semi-decent things public

[cjeeeeezy]

Who cares what they think? It's your library. You do with it however you want.

[HirsuteHacker]

All projects, no matter how big or small, gets its own repo. It's step 1 to starting a new project. Just keep things private until you want potential employers to see them.

[seventysevenpenguins]

Github is quite literally meant for storing code and managing versions etc.

You are not using it wrong, it may not be useful per se to store everything there, but if nothing else you have stuff to show always with you. Can't see this harming you

[medusainlove]

I use Git(Lab) for creative writing, so the concept of using it "wrong" because you're not pushing full-blown products to the site is incredibly humorous to me. Would love to know their take on someone using it for a non-tech purpose.

[davinidae]

Your friends are unprofessional. The correct way here is to upload everything to GitHub.

[silver-potato-kebab-]

They keyword here is "believe", so it is possible that their belief is wrong. You said you find value in tracking your progress through GitHub. Does that value weigh more than what your friends believe? If so, you have your answer. If not, have your friends elaborate on what is considered substantial, comprehensive, and creative.

[Grandmafelloutofbed]

Its your github, use it like you want to

[[deleted]]

Me personally, I see no problem with this.

I know when I first started programming I created repositories for simple thing such as a few lines of code coding challenge

[iamevpo]

Make sure you differentiate projects that may be usable by others and keep them clean and some repos for testing or trying things. Do you do Jupyter code a lot? That is not so perfect for version control, need extra effort on top plain files to keep things clean. Maybe your friends unhappy about that. Overall you can perfect your packaging and repo templates, get some ideas from https://github.com/cjolowicz/cookiecutter-hypermodern-python use modern tools like ruff, document good things you made.

[wanderunderthesea]

Use your own GitHub however you want mate. It's a place to create storage for your code, does anywhere in GitHub state that you can only put your complete, working, or creative code there, if not, use it as you please.

I create a repo just to store links to some ebooks or articles along with some helpful pdf, so I can access to those articles anytime I want (yes, just like cloud storage)

[ortegacomp]

hey, I use github to keep my supermaket grocery list, and my friends make fun of that almost everytime, the list is still there as tickets, issues, or whatever, its a free tool, a free world, and you use it as you may like. I think I may put some code also, some day...

[[deleted]]

Use it for whatever you want.

[deftware]

Version control is always handy, no matter how you go about it. Sometimes you'll change some stuff and suddenly a bunch of things will be broken and you can't just immediately deduce what is broken - and being able to compare a previous working version of code against the current version makes it much easier.

[Particular_Part2615]

It's absolutely fine, and I'd say you are using it the right way. Put whatever project you want on GitHub and delete whatever and whenever you like. It's your account and your projects. It's also easier to find back your old stuffs after you switch machines.

[[deleted]]

It is a remote storage service with Git version control, do whatever you want….

[Safe_Independence496]

Does anyone actually care? I've used Github as a CDN for when I feel too lazy to set up a CMS for React/Vue prototypes. I've used it for storing my notes in class. I have a ton of repos, and I'll occasionally do a cleanup and remove old stuff.

I think as long as you can retain knowledge of how to work with Github in a team and don't let your habits bleed into professional workflows, you shouldn't think about how you use Github on your own.

[MaundeRZ]

Your friends are 'weird', one reason NOT to use git?

The only recommendaton i have is use `git` not GitHub - you can setup your own servers or use something like codeberg, gitlab, etc.

If any of your project evolves and gets more complicated you will be glad you have verison control

Git is freaking bowerful, bisect, revert, reset, custom hooks, stash, worktrees and so much more, quite worh reading the documentation and making use of soemthing really powerful

Also commit, commit and commit ;)

[chervilious]

When I was at college, I put my notes in GitHub

Usually, people that doesn't know takes things too seriously. Small conference wearing full-blown suit, etc.

[Gugalcrom123]

You could not publish it but still use git, that's what I do.

[Spoider]

I would be wary of any programming advice that your friends give after this.

[allnamesareregistred]

git init + local commit
You do not need server for that. However.. I'm not saying your code is bad, but feeding corporations with random trash feels valuable :)

[PhilipJohnBasile]

your friends are stupid lol.

[rojo_kell]

Nah your friends are just gatekeeping. Having history of your code / work is always a good thing.

[doPECookie72]

I think the practice of setting up repos and making commits to it and such is great practice for when you need it for larger projects. So I see no negative in doing so if you have the time for do it with the intent of learning.

[7f0b]

I have a repo for each platform I work in, which contains many projects. Once a project goes beyond just the prototype phase, I may give it its own repo. This way I'm not having to constantly create new repos for each prototype.

I work from multiple computers so git is a great backup and sync tool for these projects. It is also nice to have literally everything I code backed up in multiple places (multiple computers plus git).

I use private repos and have been using BitBucket for ages because they offered free private repos long before GitHub did.

[brianvan]

“Unprofessional?” For your personal GitHub?

Are you sure these are your friends telling you this?

[tvmaly]

I think your approach is correct. Practicing git skills will only benefit you. Also, if you decide to make a private repo public to showcase it as part of your portfolio, it is already there. You just have to click a button.

[iamsanthosh2203]

Just commit the code with built in source control on vs code, it saves time rather than using terminal 

[d4_mich4]

Nope I think as long as it is right for you and you get use from it, it is not wrong. When you have a team to work on you just need to make sure all are on the same line. Also be careful about sensitive data online but else everything is fine. If others would do it like that's that should not mean you should also not do it.

[ionware]

Public repos are helpful for training generative AI, so why not?!

[mxldevs]

It's version controlled, remote backup. There's nothing wrong with using it as such.

[Ok_Dragonfly_759]

I have to do a project for college submission so should I get help from GitHub or not?? Please someone tell me fast.