GitHub is experimenting with personal READMEs

https://twitter.com/mschoening/status/1265774218404233217

by benjaminjosephw • 6 years ago

132 104 6 years ago

twitter.com

das_shark• 6 years ago

Github as social media?

api• 6 years ago

Time to collaboratively scrape the platform for archiving.

boromi• 6 years ago

I'm not a fan of turning GitHub into social media. Please GitHub don't go down this route.

Jonnax• 6 years ago

Didn't they have some feature years ago where you could tag people. And people took it as an opportunity to harass?

hampelm• 6 years ago

The original tagline for GitHub was "Social Coding"

rhn_mk13• 6 years ago

GitHub is already social media. What else is the star system, the network of forks, the profile bio and the ability to comment?

wayneftw• 6 years ago

Don’t forget the most stereo typical characteristic of function for social media: following another user.

elliekelly2• 6 years ago

Perhaps I’m in the minority but I use the star system almost like a bookmark. Is that not what it’s for? Is a star the equivalent of a “like”?

miguelmota• 6 years ago

Almost every browser denotes 'favorites' with a star, so I’ve always thought 'starring' a project meant the same as bookmarking it or storing it as a favorite to reference later.

soulclap• 6 years ago

I remember when GitHub used to have private messaging. I liked that feature. It was an easy and unified way to get in touch with other coders on there and felt less intrusive than sending them e-mails out of the blue (or opening issues for the sake of communication, as some do).

jeremy_k• 6 years ago

There have been times I've wanted to reach out to someone about their open source repository or a question and I've always wondered why there wasn't a messaging feature. Interesting to learn it used to be there.

ViViDboarder3• 6 years ago

Turning into? It’s always been that. That’s actually one of the reasons it’s been successful.

They are just leaning into it more.

httgp• 6 years ago

I for one am looking forward to this — I’d love to use it as my resume.

meddlepal• 6 years ago

I like the idea... a bit concerned about the future potential that there is an expectation developers have a GitHub personal README (err "resume") tho. That's just not practical for a lot of folks either due to time, interest, or contractual reasons.

On the other hand, most profession's do have portfolio's and other mechanisms to share work with new potential employers. For some reason developer's seem to think a hiring decision should be made entirely on a a handful of 1 hour interviews conducted in a single day when their work will usually have massive direct impact on the companies product.

I think there's mostly positives to this and some downsides.

DJHenk• 6 years ago

For some reason developer's seem to think a hiring decision should be made entirely on a a handful of 1 hour interviews conducted in a single day

As opposed to... some generic profile on a central site? I don't think that is a substitute to actually talking to a candidate.

But what do I know? If I understand sites like HN correctly, talking to a person is not a good way to discover whether he/she has any skills, so maybe this is better from a recruitment standpoint. But I'm not going to create a personal profile there. For the simple reason that the words 'personal' and 'follow our format' don't go together in my mind.

davnicwil• 6 years ago

A great piece of advice I heard I think from @patio11 is that you should really just host your own resume rather than letting a GitHub/LinkedIn/etc profile be your primary resume.

Why? Because context is powerful. When people are viewing your resume, you want 100% of their focus on you, and you want to present yourself in exactly the way that's best for you.

You don't want to present yourself within the context of another org's branding, site layout, etc, which by definition won't be optimised for you, and also syphons off some of that attention you want focused on you (as the most obvious example, say if the top bar has unread notifications).

The irony is with Github, hosting an HTML resume 'on' Github is possible and really easy already via GH pages. It's what I do :-) https://davnicwil.com/cv/

elesbao• 6 years ago

scumbag managers rejoice, every other incarnation of "check my readme to understand me" before that was a disaster.

numbsafari• 6 years ago

I see this in the context of TripleByte attempting to take on LinkedIn.

MS owns LinkedIn. This very much looks like an effort to turn GitHub profiles into LinkedIn-style profiles.

This is not going to be pretty.

zeta_• 6 years ago

Except this one is opt-in and it was a feature request from the community

robotron2• 6 years ago

Opt-in with the likely expectation that every developer worth hiring has one.

91bananas• 6 years ago

Lol at that burn to Triplebyte. What a moronic decision that was on their part.

eplanit• 6 years ago

GitHub 2020: Aaaand it's gone.

SingAlong• 6 years ago

This looks nice. I’m looking forward to using this as a page/list of blog posts/links.

jedberg• 6 years ago

I suspect you will soon see a project on github that will export your LinkedIn to read me format and vice versa.

Maybe even a git hook to do it automatically.

diminish• 6 years ago

I think soon your github, vs code editor and windows 10 login will be connected with your linkedin profile.

devmunchies• 6 years ago

its like my own personal space. they should call this feature myspace.

elliekelly2• 6 years ago

Time to dust off my CSS skills.

ilikehurdles• 6 years ago

No need, just improvise. It will be more authentic that way.

neatze• 6 years ago

This, and I do not like it.

dundercoder• 6 years ago

IMO - People are already viewing your github profile and making judgments, might as well be able to personalize what they see.

souterrain• 6 years ago

They’ve rediscovered .plan files?

robotron2• 6 years ago

That was my first thought also: .plan with MD

deft• 6 years ago

This is great, yet another place I have to repost my resume/portfolio/blog to satisfy the trend-following recruiters and hirers... Maybe I'll just do this

    # [CLICK HERE FOR MORE DETAILS](https://mysite.tld)

koolba• 6 years ago

Bonus points if you make it a redirect loop so they get sucked into a never ending void.

fermienrico5• 6 years ago

thats...that's beautiful.

fermienrico5• 6 years ago

I don't like Emojis in my documents. I think they are distracting. Tools like Notion is actively promoting it like this new Github profile docs. Does anyone else feel the same? :-)

dhritzkiv• 6 years ago

I suppose the answer is to simply not use Emoji in your documents.

fermienrico5• 6 years ago

Lol that's obvious. But, the trend is what I am concerned about and asking if others feel the same. I can't control if I am reading someone else document full of emojis. Can you imagine RFCs in this format?

To me, Emojis have a place when you're discussing with others and socially interacting. May be even in code reviews to reduce friction and add some human emotion to what you're saying in cold words. Use it to chat with people - totally ok.

Documents with emojis is definitely an anti-pattern IMO. To give an extreme example, can you imagine reading python docs with Emojis? Or Tolstoy? What about tax documents with emojis? Court proceedings? Job resumes? Aircraft emergency checklists?

saagarjha3• 6 years ago

Other people put emoji in documents you read.

carterklein13• 6 years ago

In apps like Notion, your experience is somewhat worsened if you don't use emojis. Since there's not an easy way to add "default" icons, emojis become the de-facto means of conveying information other than typing out your meaning.

Similarly, AFAIK every document in Notion has an icon associated, and when every document just has a placeholder page icon next to it - it looks ugly.

O_H_E• 6 years ago

When being overused and thrown in as plain decoration, yes. But I gotta admit, sometimes they do convey complex emotions no easily communicated over text.

Disclaimer: I am on the younger side on the age spectrum.

fermienrico5• 6 years ago

See my other comment in sibling thread. Yea they do communicate intricacies of human emotions when words fail.

chungy• 6 years ago

The examples in the tweet that spawned the discussion, they are totally overused and thrown in as plain decoration. I can barely even pay attention to the words, I'm too busy trying to figure out what the emoji mean.

codezero• 6 years ago

It's funny. I feel the same, but mainly because I feel like I have no instinct for the aesthetic.

I quite like how it looks, but it enrages me that if I try to do it, it ends up more gaudy than when I read others' docs :)

ken3• 6 years ago

When MSFT bought them, I predicted they would pivot to adding features I don’t care about. I was right. They went from the best support I’ve ever seen (report an issue, get a personal email asking for details, see it fixed) to the worst (not touching a single feature I find worthwhile).

There’s about a thousand things I wish they would fix or add before this. They still don’t allow videos so every screencast demo on GitHub is still a giant GIF, right?

I used to like GitHub so much I paid out of pocket even when I was unemployed. Now it’s on my list to check out GitLab again. Companies don’t know when to stop. It’s like they created the bicycle and add another wheel every year as an improvement.

tourist2d• 6 years ago

"GitHub is adding too many dumb features, btw please support my use case of having videos in my repo"

LordIllidan• 6 years ago

I've often wished this feature actually, especially when submitting pull requests, and you'd like to showcase the new features. I've often had to either embed a video link or convert to gif.

eythian• 6 years ago

I have a video in a gitlab readme, it's quite nice to show how my otherwise quite academic genetic algorithm toy project looks when it's animated.

ken3• 6 years ago

Actually, my use case is clicking on other people's GitHub links from time to time and not wanting 5 MB of download for 100 KB of data.

arch-ninja• 6 years ago

Search has been broken since last November and it's impossible to select text when reading files in the browser anymore because they checked a JS-powered intellisense feature in. Now I usually just checkout the repository and use ripgrep to search for code.

dstaley• 6 years ago

I search and copy text from GitHub at least a dozen times a day, so I'm not sure what you mean when you say search has been broken since November. As for the code copying, could you provide a bit more info on what's actually preventing you from selecting the text?

faizmokhtar• 6 years ago

It could be a low hanging fruit that can be easily picked up.

I'm certain they have more designers or developers working on other features as well.

I remember a few years ago people were saying Github development seems to be stuck due to legacy issues and they couldn't compete with Gitlab in terms of features.

natfriedman3• 6 years ago

We’re working on the video upload feature, which we agree is needed. What else would you like to see us do?

abhas9• 6 years ago

I would like to see improvement in the code search results. Just yesterday, I was looking for some example code.

It would be a huge plus for me if I can sort the code search results and get results from most starred repos on top.

Currently, we can only sort results by time and relevance.

anewvillager2• 6 years ago

I want to search code with regex. You know, like I do when I clone the repo to my local machine.

ken3• 6 years ago

Whoa, did I get Nat's attention? Prepare for a brain dump!

- Keyboard shortcuts: I’m always triggering these by accident. There’s no easy way (AFAICT) to block or disable them. My browser and OS already define a bunch of keyboard shortcuts. Please don’t steal existing shortcuts for non-standard uses.

- “Mobile” view: this hides so much it's nearly useless to me. (And the desktop view is a pain to use on my phone when I want to check one little thing.) 100% of the reason I use GitHub today is because -- by default, with no action required -- it displays the (entire) README, and the list of files. That’s what GitHub is.

- “?w=1” has always been one of the most useful features of GitHub. It’s completely hidden, hard to use (it messes up my browser history), and easy to forget.

- Releases/Tags: this page has only Next/Previous, no page numbers. If you want to get to an old release, you have scroll down and click "Next", and then repeat that dozens of times. “git tag” is fast (right?), so I’m not sure why normal pagination is missing here. Other GitHub lists have it. (Oh, I just found from poking around that "Subscriptions" also has only Previous/Next. I think that one's new.)

- “Issues" attachments: only a handful of file types are whitelisted, and it excludes 10 common ones I want to use (not just videos). I’ve never been able to figure out why. Is there some security issue we're avoiding by making people rename their .csv files to .txt before uploading them?

- "Issues" email responder: I see people send attachments here, and it silently drops them, instead of attaching them to the issue, or sending them a response that it doesn’t accept attachments via email. I’m tired of talking people through this. At this point, I wish I could turn off the email responder entirely, because it’s more trouble than it’s worth.

And finally, my Completely Unreasonable Requests:

- DOM stability. For example, when I'm not logged in, there's that giant "Create your own GitHub profile” banner, with the confusing “Dismiss” floating over a busy background, near the weird icon that looks like it might almost be a close button but isn't. I guess you have to always upsell, but nothing on github.com seems to ever have a stable DOM class/ID, even when there’s no reason to change it, so I regularly have to edit my user stylesheet to fix or block things I don’t want.

- “Issues" are the only major part of a GitHub project which aren't repos, so there's no easy way to back them up, or use them offline, or query them from a shell, or ... The GitHub docs always suggest some third-party API-based method for backing up Issues, and I've never gotten any of the free ones to work, and I shouldn't have to pay someone else to retrieve my own data. (The cynic in me guesses this is GitHub's primary mechanism for lock-in.) It feels like GitHub is a 2000's-era version control system, with an SVN-era bug database.

Thanks for listening to my ramblings!

cordite• 6 years ago

I kinda like this, a way to make the profile more personable rather than a vanity graph and select repos.

But this emoji fascination is beyond me.

Jefro118• 6 years ago

This is interesting move - I'm surprised they haven't done things like this earlier. The pinned repos was never a great way to provide an introduction since it lacks too much context. I've been experimenting with my own project [0] to get much more info out of GitHub profiles to demonstrate one's skills by generating portfolio sites, but if GitHub does a good job with this it might make my solution somewhat redundant.

[0] https://www.profiled.app

spv• 6 years ago

Please add math support in github markdown. Something real users need.

Stop trying to make it a social network.

saagarjha3• 6 years ago

I'd rather that they supported a standard like MathML or LaTeX.

icey• 6 years ago

There was someone working on LaTeX support a few years ago, but iirc it was very difficult to secure it enough to feel comfortable letting it run server-side for rendering. Source: I worked there when they were working on it.

jcelerier• 6 years ago

github being a social network is the main reason of its success.

mhh__• 6 years ago

Is it? Networking yes, social maybe?

I don't have any memories of early GitHub but did any of it's competitors come close to being as good?

natfriedman3• 6 years ago

We're definitely going to add math support to GitHub markdown.

maxfan8• 6 years ago

Is there a timeline for adding math support to GH markdown?

I've had to resort to human-side rendering to put LaTeX/math in a GitHub flavored markdown file.

jonchurch_2• 6 years ago

There are a lot of commenters sharing their opinions of what they don't like abut Github’s interface. It is true there are a lot of quirks and warts in what is a site many of us spend a lot of time on.

Ive found browser extensions have been a great way to augment and customize my Github experience, bringing quality of life improvements that Im grateful to have every day.

My top two favorites are:

Refined Github [1] -- huge collection of quality of life improvements. e.g. always sort issues/PRs as most recently updated first, when recently pushed to a branch show a button on project page (or upstream of fork) to open a PR based on that branch, quicklink to most reacted to comment on an issue page. Also provides a surface to inject custom CSS for personal tweaks.

Octolinker [2] -- Turns require/import/include paths in files into hyperlinks to that file or repository. I use this every single day to navigate code in projects.

I know that extensions aren't a panacea, but personally I have found them be very valuable to my workflow.

[1] https://github.com/sindresorhus/refined-github

[2] https://github.com/OctoLinker/OctoLinker

liminal• 6 years ago

Some time ago there was an article posted with a proposal for redesigning the Github UI [1]. I thought it was mostly great, but it got roundly panned on HN. In general my takeaway was that people don't like change, even when it benefits them. Was unfortunate, especially from a crowd that's supposedly all about technological improvement.

[1] https://tonsky.me/blog/github-redesign/

jonchurch_2• 6 years ago

Found the link to the HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19276113

agustif• 6 years ago

Octotree is awesome too, and you can get the dark theme with the free account https://www.octotree.io/

jorams• 6 years ago

when recently pushed to a branch show a button on project page (or upstream of fork) to open a PR based on that branch

This is actually a default feature. You don't even have to refresh the page for it to show that bar.

charlieegan3• 6 years ago

Sad to see such a negative reaction here.

We have something similar internally - we call them personal user manuals. They explain how we like to work (e.g. communication preferences), and a little bit about ourselves.

We ask new joiners to write theirs when they join. They make a good introduction to the company and can provide guidance when wondering how best to interact with others.

randormie• 6 years ago

I currently try to convey my (code) interests by pinning my favorite repositories on my profile, but this personal README is a ton more expressive. Looking forward to this!

bpicolo• 6 years ago

This is cool - would love to make one.

renewiltord• 6 years ago

Reminds me of personal user pages on Wikipedia. Very cool. I like it.

dreamcompiler• 6 years ago

My first, automatic reaction to this was a whole-head eyeroll. Great. Now Github wants to be a social network.

My second thought was "Hey if I used this I could delete my stupid Linkedin account."

dancemethis• 6 years ago

Time to start thinking on how to tell visitors that Github is an outdated mirror at best because they like to comply with ICE.

naruhodo• 6 years ago

Like it or not, people use github for self-promotion.

It's not at all unusual for recruiters to ask about your github profile. The code repositories are the resume. The personal README is the cover letter.

_the_inflator• 6 years ago

Github will be enhanced by LinkedIn features then I guess. Smart move by MS.

GitHub is experimenting with personal READMEs

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