Repository online and personal branding: how much important it is for a developer?
With an increasingly digital world, our habits have changed: just as Facebook, TikTok and Whatsapp now have an increasingly important specific weight in our daily life, the world of work has also changed, for job seekers and recruiters alike.
It’s becoming clearer, especially to millennials or generation Z, how finding work is becoming more and more complicated and less “straigthforward”. What we must finally understand is our very personal role in the job search: we can no longer be passive subjects, who send CVs randomly, clogging up the mailboxes of companies, hoping that someone will call us. We need to do marketing on ourselves, personal branding precisely.
As Sara Carbone, Career Advisor at Aulab, points out, “We are the managers of a company that bears our name”.
But what can a developer, especially a junior, do to get noticed in this stormy sea?
Artists and designers usually use a portfolio to showcase their past work and their creative side to sell themselves. Similarly, sites such as topcoder.com or fiverr.com, showcase different freelance profiles by evaluating them with the classic stars.
Although born as collaboration tools on projects, GitHub, GitLab and BitBucket can be used as portfolios for programmers. They are places that allow us to show off and present what we are good at, if we know how to use them properly.
In this regard, let’s collect some ideas, thoughts and tips:
For Mike Arwine, VP of Engineering from Raise (a digital payment service provider), “a great GitHub profile can guarantee plenty of interviews.” A very interesting tip to get noticed is being polyglots, showing interest in different languages. Also important is to write code that is readable, well formatted, well tested and documented that also shows an orderly and pragramatic approach to the commit history.
According to Nate Reynolds, VP of Engineering at ReviewTrackers (a software house that is dedicated to creating online reputation management systems for companies), it is very important to show works that are always recent, on modern or even new languages and frameworks: “this shows how the candidate is making an effective effort to stay updated on new technologies”. However, what is to be avoided for him are coding challenges of various companies (they could be private and for hiring purposes only, ed) or even commits that include environment variables (always pay attention to this !, ed).
Many others, however, view the various online repositories to evaluate the activity of that profile: a high level of activity shows how much the candidate is involved in the work of a developer. Of this same idea are Dan Gaspari, senior talent acquisition lead from CapTech (consulting company that collaborates with companies to create and manage software and other digital products) and Luca Solfanelli, founder of WorkLab (training and consulting company that helps other companies in the computerization process), which says: “from the repository I see how you program and what you have done. The more time passes, the more you have to enrich it. As a junior it is used to get used to small projects and Git. As a senior, on the other hand, you can show a life-changing-project” . A common advice to many is to respect the best practices concerning Facebook and Twitter: avoid offensive or too personal content.
Having your own projects on your own repository, however, is not just a mere list of things we have done and how: to Alex Kahn, software engineer at Mac & Mia (a shopping service that helps busy parents choose clothes for their children without wasting all day shopping), “like to see experiments and small projects that demonstrate a person’s range of interests, and whether they contribute to open source projects. I like to think that online repositories are little windows into a personal lab or on a space for collaboration”.
In his book Understanding Careers: The Metaphors of Working Lives, Kerr Inkson (University of Auckland Professor Emeritus of Management) says that:
“We can think of a career as a journey into knowledge, in which the places visited are not important but the knowledge acquired in the journey itself. […] Success, finally, is defined by the experience and knowledge gained through the journey.”
Services such as GitHub and GitLab, therefore, cannot replace the more classic CV or our LinkedIn but can tell those in front of us about the journey we have faced or what our next destination is.
And you? How is your online repository? Do you update it often? Do you include all your projects or do you choose them carefully? Tell me your experience!
