Stand out among developers with customized Github profile

Why Github Profile?

Github allows developers to customize their profiles. People can see your profile when they access to "github.com/your-user-name". With this, you can share who you are and what you do as a developer. One big benefit is you can save your time building a portfolio site from a scratch. It's also a perfect place to showcase what you do since it stores all your Git history.

So, let's customize your Github profile and advertise yourself.

Example

This is my Github profile. I tried to keep it simple and sweet but you can make yours however you want.

How to start it?

Log in to Github
Create a new repository
Name a repository name with your username
Make sure to set public

Then, you will have a newly created repository with README.md. You can customize your profile by modifying this file.

What is README.md?

The readme is based on markdown. With markdown, you can add your flavor to the plain text. For example, you can make a certain sentence bold. Or you can add tables to your docs.

If you never used markdown before, start with this. As we can use markdown in other places, I recommend spending time playing with it.

What to put in?

The general rule

I'd like to think Github profile as a resume. If you put too many highlights, people will get distracted by your messy resume and lose interest. So, keep in mind that simplicity is the best.

Who you are

First of all, tell people who you are. Your name, your job title, or your interest. Tell people who you are.

What you do

Next, let people know what you are working on.

If you have a job,

what is your job title
what is your current tech stack
what is your role in your current position

If you don't have a job,

what do you want to be
what do you study or prepare now

You may capture the opportunities by sharing this information when future employers look through your Github profile.

Highlights

Not everything you do is equally significant to the audience. Instead of putting A-Z, make a few bullet points. What is your highlights? What are the projects that you are proud of the most? Remember, keep it simple and sweet.

Add flavors

Utilizing the packages

There are free packages you can use to make your profile more visually enjoyable. I will introduce a few I use for mine.

One popular is Github Streaks. It provides a visual of your total contributions and streaks.

Another popular one is Github Stats. It provides a visual of your Git history.

These packages are easy to set up. If you access to the sites, you can simply copy and paste code. And replace the username with yours then magic will happen.

Github Actions

Github actions is CI/CD platform that allows you to automate your workflow. You can make your profile more delightful with Github actions.

To use Github actions,

Go to your Github profile repository and click the Actions tab
Click the new workflow

Configure Yaml to your own needs. A few notes about configuration.
1. You can change the workflow name as you want.
2. You can schedule this workflow to make it run automatically.
3. You can use solutions that other developers already built.

This is the workflow I'm using to fetch what I've written on my blog.

You can find more Github actions in here.

Conclusion

Today I covered Github profile. It can be daunting to set up the profile at once. So start with the bare minimum and update as you go. As every developer is using Github for their development work, having the right profile can bring you unexpected opportunities. You can use mine if you want to have a kick starter Github Profile.

If you like this, follow @bitethecode and Github for more useful content..!