In 2021, visibility is everything. Setting yourself apart from the rest of your cohort is important for success. This could be your college, your current employee, your industry, etc. It’s a difficult balance between keeping yourself safe online and making sure those interested in your skills and capabilities have an easy way to reach out to you. I am no where near as brave as Gary Vaynerchuck who posts their phone number to all social media platforms, but boy does what he says resonate with me.

Luckily, whether you’re new to the industry of you’ve been around for a while, I have a few tricks for GitHub that could help build your network and hopefully help you land the job of your dreams.

Safely Sharing your Email Address

Getting discovered and communicated with can be the make or break in someones career. The downside is that sharing your email address publicly guarantees a spam filled inbox every morning. How do you separate out the humans from the bots? For those who use Gmail, I highly recommend either adding a . or a + to your profile email address displayed on your GitHub profile. These two options work slightly different so pay attention.

Gmail will ignore any . added to an email address. This means username@gmail.com is the same account as user.name@gmail.com. Might be hard to believe, but this is one way to filter emails based on recipient.

Next, Google did something fun when it comes to respecting the RFC’s for SMTP. This includes the use of + to append to your email address for sorting and organization. Gmail will deliver the message username+github@gmail.com to your inbox of username which allows your to filter and label messages on the use of the +github suffix.

Customizing your GitHub.com Profile

This is something that’s been around for a while but still not known very widely. I stumbled upon it a while back while backing up my self-hosted blog, mikemackintosh.com, during my transition to Medium. Instinctually, I started typing the name out for the domain, and then this popped up! Make sure to check the box for Add a README file when generating your repository. This will give you a place to start working on your new profile view.

Important things to add to your README are links to Twitter, Instagram, StackOverflow, etc, which allows other to follow you around the web and build your Klout!

Making your README’s Better

README’s are the most important files in any repository. They provide direction on your problem and what you’re trying to solve, set the vibe of the project, let others know how to run your code and contribute. There are a few things that can make README’s better and that includes badge and images.

Badges are little tags that you can add usually through the use of a dynamic image. The image will always point to the same destination URL but the file will change based on some criteria like a failing test or a successful deploy. Below you will see a GitHub actions badge showing that the code is successful. You are more likely to have contributors and clones if your code is hygienic and working as expected.

Secondly, adding images to README’s is not hard. Making them look good is. For example, Twonicorn has a centered transparent PNG in the banner. This adds some color and flair to the README as well as builds brand awareness. GitHub-flavored Markdown does not support positioning, but luckily there is a trick!

The above README includes the following HTML code:<p align="center">
 <img width="120px" src="https://github.com/<org>/<repo>/raw/master/_docs/logo.png" />
</p>

This snippet uses a paragraph block to center align an image element. Within the image element, you can set width, height or both. If you host your image within your repository, grab the raw link (as if you were downloading the image), and use that for your image source. Relative links also work, but will break depending on the tool being used to view the repository, so keep that in mind.

Successors

Your contributions to the world are important. Every piece of content that you write, every commit you author and push is like adding to the human timeline that the blockchain tries so hard to imitate. If anything happens to you, your information joins the public domain with no recourse for corrections, updates, or community growth. Find a friend or a family member that you can have access your account in the event something happens to you. Let’s be honest, it’s not a great subject, but better to be prepared.

The Education Pack

If you’re still in school or have access to your university or college email address, be sure to stop by and claim the benefits from GitHub’s educational pack at https://education.github.com/pack. This pack is loaded with hundreds of dollars worth of discounts and free stuff that will make your life and learning better. Imagine saving $100 on DigitalOcean credits so you buy the good ramen, not the kind that you boil. If you are trying to make your resume stick out, just don’t put keywords to pass technical screeners on your resume. Go ahead and use these credits to build projects. Don’t follow a tutorial and publish the code (most senior dev’s can easily spot this), but go solve your own problem. Link to your profile via LinkedIn and reference your code during your interview. A good interview will revolve around what you’re capable of, and your code gives a starting point.

Staying Secure

Don’t think you’re safe from the bad guys. Frequently stop by the account security section of GitHub’s users settings. Here, you have the ability to configure Multifacor Authentication (2FA) and keep an on where your account was recently accessed from. Be sure you kill any unrecognized sessions, such as the one below.

A Few More Tricks

There’s so much you can do with GitHub and you don’t have to have a Computer Science degree to figure it out (I don’t!). Before you leave your profile page, be sure to check out Saved Replies which are great if you’re a community moderator or maintainer and typing similar responses all the time. I was personally worried when Github was acquired by Microsoft that the quality of the service would slowly decline like New York street vendors.

Keep yourself, your community and your data safe.

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