Recently, I applied to a position that asked about contributions I've made to GitHub. I've purposely avoided doing any for the longest time. But the job posting also asked for a Cover Letter that was not a "standard" Cover Letter. So here's what I had to say about GitHub contributions in my "non-standard" Cover Letter:
I finally gave up and contributed one of my small libraries to GitHub and the NuGet gallery. Links are:
https://github.com/silverfox1948/SACC.OperationResult https://www.nuget.org/packages/SACC.OperationResult/
Why do I say “I finally gave up …”? For the most part, stuff on GitHub (and incidentally NuGet) is dreck. A lot of it seems as if the developer just wanted to point at something they’d put up there in order to say “See! I did this!”.(Possibly because some employers are asking about what their contributions to GitHub are…)
The other reasons are:
My employers want to use libraries that are and will be continued to be supported for a long time. The reason they are using a library is because they don’t want to have to write & support it themselves. If it’s a one person library, it won’t have adequate support. I’ll be supporting my little library because I use it myself on all my projects.
A lot of the contributions have absolutely no documentation at all. It’s just “read the unit tests to figure out how to use it.” If the developer is too lazy to document his product and is unwilling to:
v Convince me of the benefits of their product
v Show me how to use it in my non-unit test code
Then I treat their actual code with a very high level of suspicion …
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