Do I Need a GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket Profile as a Developer?

Key Takeaways

hey folks what's up Stan Bader here and after previous video I got some questions around github and basically open source portfolios or whether or not you should make github a part of your portfolio and your online presence as a developer and so in this video I want to cover some of that and also talk about some alternatives here so maybe let's go over the alternatives first so that you know kind of what the space looks like so of course github is kind of the best-known I think it's the biggest service offering a repository hosting and it's free to sign up but then you can only have public repositories and if you want to keep your code private you know for personal projects let's say like your website or some other projects you have to pay I think it starts at four or five dollars a month seven okay so I've got a paid account and I'm very happy with github so personally I would go with github if you're looking to make this part of your developer portfolio just because github is such a well-known brand and it has so much traction that's why I would go with github now some alternatives would be good lab which I think as the main distinction it probably has a couple more awesome features that I don't know about it things like they have build servers and everything integrated but if you're looking at it from a portfolio perspective I think the big difference is that they do free repositories as well which doesn't really mean I mean you could still put your public facing open-source stuff on github and that's probably what I would do but good lab could be a good alternative they haven't been a lot around for too long it could be a good alternative another alternative would be a bit bucket which again lets you sign up for a free account they also have free private repositories as a difference compared to github personally like I said I would probably go with github just because they have the best known brand and I feel like their interface is the best personally so I would go with github but really you know as long as you have as long as you have some public facing presence and one of the platforms I think you'll be fine because there's not that much of a difference you know people are going to be able to browse your code and all that right let's take a look at my github profile as an example so um I set that up several years ago and just kind of you know started releasing all of my open source stuff on on my github and I've got a couple of projects here so they they recently rolled out a change where didn't they let you sort the project that are displayed here and you can take advantage of that and kind of you know put your best work out there so people can see what you're all about and I think this is really a key part of having a good online portfolio or good online presence as a developer you know this is I think you should start with your blog or write about programming and then very soon after or almost immediately you want to add something like a github profiler or a good lab profile a bit bucket profile where you just share some of your code so people can see what your skills level skill levels are and they can just get a feel for you and I think it really helps having some open source projects here and you know the things you start with they don't have to be super impressive right like for example I did this little thing where I was I was not happy that there weren't any good readme templates for open source projects out there so I started this readme template repository and it got a couple of likes and it you know that stuff is very easy to to set up but it actually provides some value to people and and people are going to see that basically you want to make the world a better place right because you're putting this work in and you're giving it away for free and so stuff like that it really shows that you know you care about software you care about programming that you want to give back to the community and I I really care about those things and so this is a great way to do that and then at the same time get some credit for it so when you're applying for a job or someone's going to seek out your github portfolio or your guid lab or bitbucket portfolio they're they're just gonna see that you're active and you know you're passionate about this stuff and now with something like schedule which has you know a couple of thousand likes on github now or stars or whatever with this stuff it's all about the humble gamings right I start I wrote this over a weekend threw it out there people on reddit hated it and and now it's won it you know it's a really popular Python library on github so if you have something like that like that has put me in touch with a lot of people and open a lot of opportunities for me so this is great but you know you just got to try a bunch of things and because you never really know what's going to get traction where people are going to like but to to kind of put a conclusion on that yes absolutely I think if you're serious about building an online presence as a developer I would definitely start with a personal website add github as soon as possible and then you probably I mean you definitely want a LinkedIn profile as well I think and you probably want to think about adding a Twitter account as well and then I think you've got your basis pretty much covered but at least that's what worked for me and that's kind of bias towards that but I've seen that work really well in other people so this is kind of the strategy that I would take alright so if you enjoyed this video then please subscribe to my channel I'm going to have many more videos on this topic and kind of how to build your online presence as a developer as a Python developer if you have any more questions about this topic and feel free to drop a comment below the video or reach out to me on Twitter or send me an email cool thank you very much