Dear GitHub: Please let us sort our projects

http://oddshocks.com/dear-github-please-let-us-sort-our-projects/

by oddshocks • 12 years ago

233 68 12 years ago

oddshocks.com

ozh• 12 years ago

And tag them also. And also tag our gists.

Jake232• 12 years ago

I've always wondered why github never had tags.

jnbiche3• 12 years ago

tagged gists! I could actually start using them for reference, in lieu of (or possibly in addition to) my current personal wiki.

dfc2• 12 years ago

And please let me sort by mtime when viewing files/dirs in the "tree view mode."

malkia• 12 years ago

Especially for projects that use some form of "git submodule" and their modules appear top-level in the github page (or other sites for that matter)

dfc2• 12 years ago

Sorting by date is a nice way to see what is being worked on and what has not been touched in a while. Especially for projects that have a hundreds of plugins/translators/widgets in individual files. There is not even an easy way to do it on the command line, so those relative dates on the right hand column just taunt me .

pwelch• 12 years ago

Another missing sorting option that blows my mind is sorting issue tags.

I find it hard to quickly search Issues tags when they are in no specific order. I would settle for letting me drag them in an order I want rather than order they were created.

kjjw• 12 years ago

So desperately want a way to sort repos other than by most recent commit time. I think I'd give a toe for this.

Needs to be a sort selected for others to view when they look at my or my organisations' repo list.

scribu• 12 years ago

Yes, please!

I would also be happy with just being able to create groups on the repositories tab. Nothing fancy, just being able to say: "Hey, these are my old WordPress plugins; these are my esoteric projects etc."

bmoresbest55• 12 years ago

Yes! GitHub, over here! We really want this! Please! ... And thank you!

cwalcott• 12 years ago

If GitHub profiles really are becoming the "new resume", I think users are need more control over them. Certainly sorting projects is a good start.

MasterScrat• 12 years ago

Well there's still GitHub pages...

jnbiche3• 12 years ago

Yeah, but potential clients and employers tend to look closely at your Github profile, regardless of what you've put up on GH Pages.

arebours• 12 years ago

I think it would be awesome to be able to commit README for your user page. It would resolve the sorting problem too - you could just list your projects the way you like it (even with description for each of them).

jordigh5• 12 years ago

This is one thing that bugs me a lot about how centralised Github becomes: if you want any changes, you have to resort to begging with blog posts.

sauravt• 12 years ago

How else would you want it to be ?

VaedaStrike2• 12 years ago

when you can do individualized filters that'd be nice. I mean if the underlying data/format isn't touched, but you you can tweek how you consume stuff, that'd be nice.

jordigh5• 12 years ago

Allow me to actually change this in the code. I don't really get github. They hold everyone's code and encourage everyone to share code, but they don't share their own.

This is why I left bitbucket:

https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issue/3054/make-bitbucket-...

patcon2• 12 years ago

A public issue queue for github? :)

This will do for now: https://github.com/isaacs/github

fenollp2• 12 years ago

GitHub could put up a voting user-oriented website much like the now discontinued Ubuntu Brainstorm.

I have plenty of ideas for them…

* allow symlinks in the gh-pages branch

* do not `chmod u+x` every text file in zip archives

* actually support `git-archive`

* make rebasing of PRs easier

* look for a contributor's code in a repo

* when looking at a file, have a link showing current PRs editing it

VaedaStrike2• 12 years ago

This thought literally just occurred to me yesterday when I was looking at the famo.us repo.

what would be cool would be if each one could create their own views/rankings of anyone's public repo.

Dorian-Marie2• 12 years ago

Or you can also have a website where you do that

oddshocks4• 12 years ago

As other folks have mentioned, the issue is that many people looking to hire just look at your GitHub page and your repo list.

Dorian-Marie2• 12 years ago

As someone you hires too, I do that, but also look at the website if there is any.

blatherard• 12 years ago

I just experienced the other side of this problem yesterday. I was checking out a job applicant who had a lot of repositories and I couldn't easily figure out which ones really mattered. Fortunately, he also had his own portfolio site. The github profile was effectively useless.

jonathanmarvens• 12 years ago

"The github profile was effectively useless." - exactly!

elwell2• 12 years ago

Related to this, forks, imo, should always be sorted to be after original repos.

cldwalker• 12 years ago

If you're curious what contributions a user has made to their forks, I wrote a simple that breaks down # of commits per fork e.g. http://github-contributions.herokuapp.com/cldwalker

elwell2• 12 years ago

That's pretty cool, thanks!

josephschmoe• 12 years ago

Please don't use Github profiles as a CV.

randunel2• 12 years ago

He sounds like my project manager, when adding a new feature just by mentioning it during a demo, and sees our faces:

"What I'm asking wouldn't be hard at all"

:))

Unless you're intimately involved with the project or a guru in similar projects, you've got no idea whether any feature would be hard / simple, time-consuming/interesting.

jessaustin• 12 years ago

...you've got no idea...

That's why they should be taking PRs.

oddshocks4• 12 years ago

I didn't mean to devalue the challenge of implementing and testing a new feature. All I'm saying is that it wouldn't require much problem solving. It'd just be a sorted list, perhaps with the ability to reorder and resize items with some JavaScript. The GitHub devs are obviously skilled coders, and have many JavaScript ninjas among them.

randunel2• 12 years ago

Personally, I am under the same impression as yours. Adding a custom order functionality should not be that difficult, even with all these types of repos (forks, private, org, etc). I would benefit from such a feature, as would my colleagues. But maybe there's a deeply nested technical debt that prevents them from doing that atm.

I was just bringing up the similarity between your apparent devaluation of the challenges a new feature brings, with my project manager's ability of adding "sure, done by tomorrow" features during demos :D

doesnt_know• 12 years ago

The difference is that these are pretty much all developers asking for features. You can guarantee that if github core was on github, the author would probably have wrote the feature and made a pull request instead of having to resort to asking via a blog post.

patcon2• 12 years ago

Maybe open an issue here: https://github.com/isaacs/github

Visit this link after the one above to find a github easter egg :) https://github.com/contact

bnferguson• 12 years ago

Haha, not intended to be an easter egg at all. That message happens for any non-Organization-owned, non-private, non-owned-by-you repo.

eg hit https://github.com/mbostock/d3 then https://github.com/contact

Just reads a bit funny in the case of https://github.com/isaacs/github :)

oddshocks4• 12 years ago

brenoc has kindly opened an issue here: https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/166

Thanks!

pointpointclick• 12 years ago

In the last paragraph OP writes "I implore you to allow us to sort our own repos. I know that there are mixed feelings about Windows 8's tile layout for their start menu, but I think that's the sort of thing that we need for project sorting."

Just like they've been grouping projects on their explore pages -- https://github.com/explore -- I would love to see this functionality availble to users to sort repos on their own profile pages as well.

pearjuice• 12 years ago

Completely unrelated, but I couldn't stop laughing when I finished reading the article and saw "David Gay" as the post author at the bottom. Every time he introduces himself, reactions might range from hilarity to anger.

Good for him to live with the pride of his ancestors and not changing his last name. Probably why the domain is oddshocks.com instead of his full name; I see it easily ending up on the wrong side of a NSFW-filter.

oddshocks4• 12 years ago

While I understand why folks voted this down, but it made me laugh. :) I never thought about the NSFW filter, but I believe domains that fit my full name were taken when I registered the domain.

When I was a little kid, my last name was a problem because of the times I grew up in, but nowadays it only leads to hilarity. Plus it's short and easy to spell. ;)

kurtfunai• 12 years ago

I completely agree with this. It has bothered me for a long time that I cannot sort my own projects by what I think is important.

bkurtz13• 12 years ago

With more and more companies using your GitHub page as a resume of sorts, this kind of customization is becoming a necessary requirement.

yaddayadda• 12 years ago

Another GitHub nuisance: I'm a huge fan of pinboard.in and use the Firefox popup bookmarklet quite a bit but github repositories [1] won't let me bookmark them with the bookmarklet. GitHub repositories are literally the only pages I've found the I haven't been able to use the pinboard bookmarklet, and it's been that way with every single GitHub repository I've tried to pinboard.

[1] Strangely github.io pages bookmark just fine.

zrail• 12 years ago

Have you asked Maciej about that? He may be able to fix it and he's super active on twitter https://twitter.com/pinboard/

conroy• 12 years ago

The bookmarklet fails due to GitHub's content security policies[0], which disable inline scripts. I'd suggest installing the Pinboard browser extension to get around those limitations.

[0] https://github.com/blog/1477-content-security-policy

jnbiche3• 12 years ago

Strongly agree. Now that Github is being used as a de facto CV, it's really important for our Github page to show our strongest projects first.

If some silly project I contributed to 4 years ago pops up first on my Github page, most potential clients and/or employers are not going to make the effort to scroll through pages of projects to find the projects most representative of my current abilities.

On the bright side, this exact phenomenon has led me to go back and clean up a few projects of mine that became unexpectedly popular. Now they have documentation and updates that I probably wouldn't have made otherwise (although their popularity alone also propelled me to make these changes).

chimeracoder• 12 years ago

Strongly agree. Now that Github is being used as a de facto CV,

First off, I really dislike this practice to begin with.

That said, under this practice, the current approach discourages people from forking others' repositories (I know at least one person who has a separate account just for this, so it doesn't "clutter" his list of repositories).

It also discourages contributing to new projects with fewer stars. Currently, my contribution to Github's linguist (1880 stars) shows up on my 5 "repositories contributed to". If I contribute to my friend's one-off project, it may or may not push that off and I have no way of knowing, since those five aren't even ordered in any way that I can make sense of. (I have experimented with this in the past, and the repository that seems to be bumped when I make a new submission is arbitrary, as far as I can tell).

aray• 12 years ago

When I was finishing university and looking for a job, I actually started deleting minor git repos that never really blossomed into bigger projects, because I was afraid of interviewers/potential employers going over those instead of the projects I was more proud of.

Now I kinda regret nuking all that work (didn't think to keep backups around), but a better solution for this would prevent anyone from doing similar in the future.

rkuykendall-com• 12 years ago

A lot of these solutions sound very complex. Sorting, tags, categories, grid, trees...

How about just showing my repos that I starred at the top? Or if you want to get slightly more complex, a "Feature" button similar to "Star."

catshirt3• 12 years ago

i have almost 40 repositories. many private (because i don't want them to muddy up my Github image). a single boolean "featured" is terribly insufficient. tagging would be fantastic.

AznHisoka• 12 years ago

When I login to github, the repos I've "contributed" to (not even checkin code, but comment on) are on top, while my own are below the fold. What gives? I just wanna access my own repo.

j2kun• 12 years ago

Maybe my repos are a bit more popular (they're connected to a blog I write), but I've noticed that my best repos get pushed to the top by how often others star them.

Still, couldn't you use the username.github.io to feature your repos? Or at least have a prominent link from a github profile to that page?

catshirt3• 12 years ago

if you only have 1 repository with more than 10 stars, sorting your work seems a like a premature optimization.

andrewguenther• 12 years ago

Employers aren't going to judge a project based on how many stars it has, that's the exact issue this is trying to address. One of the projects I am most proud of has no stars. Popularity has little bearing on how well designed or elegant a piece of code it.

catshirt3• 12 years ago

i'll agree that in order for Github to become the personal CV (and it should!), it needs to account for all use cases (ie. profiles without any popular repositories).

but, as a hiring manager, i don't use Github as a measure for competence. i use Github as a measure for involvement in the open source community (competence usually comes incidentally).

having 30 projects with 0 stars does not really do anything for me that a single code sample through email could not. no matter how you categorize them.

hardwaresofton• 12 years ago

A note on the dot-files... would you consider putting your dot files/configration files in a project like mine:

http://configr.io

The project is pretty old, but I started it with the assumption that maybe dot files (that are OK being in the public domain) shouldn't be on github in the first place.

I never did get github integration working, and the site is very basic, but I would love some opinions on it

Dear GitHub: Please let us sort our projects

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