I’m still in my learning phase and I make many small projects as I learn. Is putting all of them on Github a good idea, if I want to put it on my resume in the future, or would having too many repositories on Github a bad thing?
Repeating what others have said, and adding a bit:
- it’s fine to have a bunch of repositories.
- “pin” the ones you would most like to talk about in a job interview
- “archive” projects that you’re completely done with
- be aware that pinned repositories and whichever repository has the most recent activity is probably the ones that I - an interviewer - will pick to ask questions about.
Do I archive every small project that I’m done with?
What would you do if I archived the repositories with the most recent activity?Just archive projects that you don’t want to talk about. That’s pretty much all “archive” is for. It’s a message to the world “I don’t use this anymore. Don’t ask me about it.”
They won’t look until you have captured their attention and are trying to decide you vs someone else. unless it is an open source job nobody else will have a github account.
make sure nothing illegal to ask in an interview is there. I don’t want to know you are black/white/married/have kids/or what ever. those can only hurt as I’m not supposed to know and I feel cheated when I find out and that works against you.
Not necessarily. Just make sure the best projects are pinned or listed on your resume. Nobody has time to crawl through your entire GitHub anyway.
I have 2 GitHub accounts, one under a pseudonym and one under my real name. The pseudonym has probably 200+ repos and that is absolutely not a flex. Most of them are absolute garbage. Tutorials I expanded, projects I started and never fleshed out, documentation for stuff I meant to dive deep into (or sometimes actually did), etc. if a project actually moves along to a place I feel is respectable and worth showing off a bit I’ll clone it to the other account, which has like 10-15 repos maybe
That said I have no clue if this actually matters
The commits on the 2nd account would have a different name and email right?
I think so, I use a different one at least
A repo per project is not necessarily bad. However, don’t create five dozen documentation projects, each of which is just a list of references. That’s padding, and it’ll be really obvious and annoying.
What do you mean by documentation projects?
I’ve interviewed a candidate that created dozens of GH projects, each one just being a list of tools for various topics. So they’d have “Programming tools”, “Security”, “Databases”, etc. They may have thought that on the surface it would show them as a well-rounded candidate, but if you dug into it, it was just that - a set of lists. Even AI generated slop that gets churned out by the dozens these days has more content than those projects did. Even worse, when asked about their experience with the tools, the candidate couldn’t give a useful response. It was like asking about the Donner Party and getting an answer about birthday parties.
That does sound a little dumb but maybe they were trying to create their own resource like awesome-lists or something
