When a candidate sends a CV and includes a GitHub profiler, that almost always guarantees that I’ll give that profile a look. The most interesting thing from my perspective in a GitHub profile is that it allows me to look at the candidate’s work. There aren’t that many candidates with GitHub profile links, and not having a link isn’t something that will cause me to rule out a candidate. But I thought it would be interesting to share some of my finding from such trawling of repositories.

Here is an example of something that I don’t like:

In fact, in most code bases, I’ll skim very quickly to find the data access code. SQL Injection is a pet peeve of mine, and seeing how a candidate’s code handle user’s input is an easy way to get a first impression. It isn’t always indicative of “this person has no skills and is careless”, mind. But I found that it is a good place to start. Especially because mostly I’ll see sample projects and half finished stuff. So seeing how they treat this particular issue (which is easily found and should be familiar to most developers) is a good quick check. Then again, here is the same candidate, with another repository:

This is using Hibernate, by the way. And that kind of hurt my feelings, to be fair.

On the other hand, a different candidate:

That is a much better, and show that they pay attention to other functional requirements.

In general, I consider the presence of a GItHub link in a CV as an invitation to evaluate the candidate’s work and will do so with the goal of understanding their approach, the quality of their code and their skills. As such, if you include a GitHub link in a CV, I would recommend consider this to be your public face and a criterion for evaluation.

This is an advantage. It means that the GitHub link mere existence make you pop out of the crowd. On the other hand, it also means that your code is under scrutiny.

I’m advising here for people starting out, without much background. As such, having a straightforward way to be evaluated on your skills is a plus. I would suggest making it easier. For example, a clear README is nice, especially if you explain what you were trying to do. “Playing around with Angular to see how it feels” is a great thing to have, because it gives context to the person reading your code. Especially for web applications and client side work, having a visible demo that I can quickly look at is great.

On the other hand, having well known bad practices (such as SQL Injection, plain text passwords, etc) in the code is a big negative.