coder . cl

On a recent job post on a certain site, for the very first time I have seen the requirement of having code published on github.com. Some employers must rethink about their job postings. You must know that github is not the only one social coding website. For example I host my projects on sourceforge.net. You can see my code any time, you just need to know how to use a browser, also you can download my code and send me patches if you find any bug on my hosted projects. Everything will be registered and will be public if you use the proper channel to do your commitment.

Each site has its own pros and cons, but all of them can provide you the same features, and make your code public. I like sourceforge.net over github.com because it provides at least three options on SCM systems: git, svn and cvs. Also it provides forums, mailing lists and various other tools that can make your FOSS project something relatively active in the community. The advantage of github, is the fact that users can do pull requests directly to your repository, instead of using mailing lists to distribute your patches, also you can comment those pull requests and request some feedback about your patches.

So, if there are more options, not only github. Why are you requesting github only applicants?. There is also beanstalkapp.com and bitbucket.org among other sites. The main idea is to have published code or to have participation at least on one FOSS project, so people can see your code and evaluate how good are you on programming. The fact is that if you have participation on a FOSS project, you are evaluated by your peers, people who is coding too, and people that have a relatively common way to evaluate the source code. I just can’t imagine someone that applies to that job posting using his kernel.org or freebsd.org accounts and being refused because they are not github repositories…

If you want to evaluate source code public source code from some applicant, first you must consider using a wide range of websites that are hosting source code. Then, you must consider the scope of the code to be evaluated, for example is a very common behaviour that each project has its own normative on coding standards, you can’t throw away the code just because it is not using camel case and it is a BSD project, or a Python project, since it do not uses that normative. Also, you can see the downloads statistics for each public project. For example I have about 5000 downloads on pyxser from its publication, plus those downloads that are made directly using easy_install and third party distributors, like softpedia. People is using pyxser because it is very stable, do not have any memory leaks and can work very fine on parallel environments and applications — it uses thread safe code.

So, if you are looking for published code, github is not the only one site where you can find it. Make sure that you will get a wider perspective on the source code. On my resume I mention my FOSS projects, but since HR departments are not technical, they do not consider those projects and sincerely, nobody has asked about them on any job where I applied for a long time, only when I have to meet some technical leader on some companies they ask for those projects. Seems that the joke about the amount of mentions on skills related to the job description are quite real…