Github - Contribute to evolve

I’ve been using github for quite a time now but I don’t have much going on at my github account. Yes I do have a few projects but none of them is that active. I had left expanding most of them quite a long time ago. But I have just decided to go full throttle and let’s see why is it so. I’m quite hopeful that, by the end of this article you’ll be at least inclined to create a Github account. I recently read a detailed blog post regarding the Github statistics and I instantly fell in love with it (wish I could link you to that but, I wasn’t able to find it …I might post the link later). Especially the green graph on your profile that tells you how many days in a row you’ve committed code, that’s the best and the most addictive thing. First of all, it’s really fun to see your stats and once you get the streak going, you just can’t break it.

That’s not the only thing that has pumped me to take up the initiative. The other exciting thing is the implication for the job seekers. They can have a look at your github profile and assess your hard-work, abilities and skill-set from your github profile. You might be interested in reading Github is your new Resume. Quoting the point that striked me:

A resume has become nothing more than a formality to weed out people flipping jobs too often.

If you want to stand out of all the people that have applied for the same job, you have to run an extra mile. Instead of just writing a list of skills and projects on your resume, if you put your github account showing some of your code samples, your contributions to the community, the statistics and popularity of your repositories in front of the employer, it can do the magic for you. That’s not just it. Apart from the hiring benefits, it can help you evolve at a super fast pace. If you are more like me who is fond of looking at the other people’s code and hone his personal skills in the process then github is the way to go.

Here is what you should do, just go through the opensource repositories, look for the one that seems appealing to you, look at the code and try to understand it, expand it by playing with it and if it seems so contribute to the repository. That’s it now look at the outcome of this, number one; you’ve got the streak on your profile showing that you have given yourself to the contribution without demanding something in return and your purpose was just to get your brain unfolded and that’s enough for someone to understand your passion. Number 2; you’ve got a repository listed in your contributions and you can list it in one of your projects. Number 3; you have learnt some new tricks, by looking at the tricks of some fellow magician of the community, that not only you can show off in the public as well as in your secret recipes.

There is more …the benefit of having opensource repositories is, you’ll have in your mind that it’s the thing that you’re going to present to the public so you’ll try your level best to write the code as clean and effective as possible. You can then post a link to your project on stackoverflow, reddit, twitter and other numerous forums out there and ask for the people to critique or contribute to your project to help you make it better. Believe me there are people dying out there just to contribute to the society. If you’ll develop something, people will surely start to gather around.

If it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing – Ayn Rand

That’s enough of the reasons to go full throttle on github, I think. And these are some of the reasons due to which I’ve planned to push myself harder on github from this point forward. What I’ve planned is to achieve an unbroken streak and for that I’m planning on making at least one contribution per day, and I said at least …I will try my level best to make it more. And I think even if I forced myself to do something like this, I will find myself learning so much so quickly by spending just an hour or so.

Now that I have committed to be active on github, the next challenging part is choosing a better project idea, the one that may attract the contributors more and more. And while I’m looking for the idea I’ve created this simple javascript repository over github called Handy JS Functions on which I’m constantly pushing javascript functions on daily basis so that I may keep myself in the flow. And I must say this simple initiative i.e. trying to write at least one trivial javascript function per day is also contributing to my learning. Plus, it’s getting the attention of the people as well. It’s just been two days and the repository has got 5 stars and 6 forks already.

That said, let’s take this article to an end. Taking into account the benefits, I hope, some of you must have convinced themselves to start using Github :-)

Stay tuned, if you’d want to see what I’m contributing by following me on Github or on twitter.

Until next time, Happy social coding!