What Code Should I Put On My GitHub/GitLab/BitBucket Profile?

Hey, what's up? It's Dan Bader here and I got this question from uh a YouTube commenter on one of my videos about what to put on your GitHub. So, if you're a developer and you're building up a um development portfolio or you're kind of using GitHub as um a place to show off your work and um well to show the world, you know, what a great programmer you are and um using GitHub for that purpose or any other site, you know, like um I was going to say SourceForge, but I probably wouldn't recommend uh them these days. Um you know, like Atlassian's Bitbucket or anything like that, GitLab, GitHub, they all pretty much work the same way. Personally, I really like GitHub because it's just the biggest site and um it's the the the best known brand, I think. So, you know, maybe some of that will color off on your portfolio as well. So, I got this question from a YouTube commenter and here she asks, "Is exercises from courses you're taking worth putting on GitHub? How about old guies and scripts you've used in your own work but uh that are not that interesting for other people?" So I guess to summarize the question, you know, is it worth putting code that you have sort of lying around? Is it worth putting that on GitHub or um how how should you start out? At least that's how I'm interpreting this question. And I think it's actually a really good question because, you know, you're starting out, you're starting to populate your GitHub profile and um you maybe you're wondering, okay, what kind of quality of code do I actually need to put there so that it's beneficial, right? because um I would imagine that you're starting out with your GitHub profile with a goal in mind, right? Like maybe you want it to um kind of serve as a developer portfolio and it's going to be a helpful thing for you to apply at a job and um you know you want people to look at it and go like oh this person is a good programmer and um I think for that purpose um you it makes sense to think about what you want to put on your GitHub profile, right? And um my take on it is that I think having something up there is better than having a completely empty profile. So I would probably start you know if this is the only thing you can upload at the moment and put there and open source at the moment I would just start with whatever you have in mind right you can always go back and then later remove things or um you know improve them. But if you're just starting out, like just take something as long as it's not just copy and pasting other people's code, which which gives off a horrible signal, right? Like I've seen that, you know, interviewing people and you browse their like you read their resume, you browse their GitHub account and you think like, oh, there's a lot of stuff on there, but then when you actually look at it, you can see that they've just been copy and pasting other people's code and kind of pretended it was theirs. And and that's not a great signal, right? you don't want to that's not what you want to communicate. So I would definitely avoid that. However, with uh the question here, it sounds like they have this developer has like original content, right? And and even if it's just guey like guey apps and and scripts, I think it's totally worth putting that on your GitHub if it's original code and if it's, you know, represents your skills. I don't think you want to upload a bunch of stuff that isn't, you know, up to the level of quality that you're working with at at the moment at this point in time, right, when you're creating this portfolio. So, I probably wouldn't upload, you know, code that I wrote, I don't know, like, you know, 7 years ago because it wouldn't um it wouldn't be in my favor. I mean, I might actually it would be kind of interesting to preserve that. I would love to look at that myself, but I might not make it necessarily not necessarily make it public, right? So I would definitely keep that in mind also. Um and I want to also speak a bit to this this one uh point in the question about things maybe not being as interesting for other people or interesting enough for other people. So, in my experience, you know, the internet is pretty big and it's kind of crazy and kind of cool to see what even like a super niche thing, how many people this can attract because, you know, whatever these scripts do, I almost guarantee you there's going to be someone or a couple of people, you know, every week or every month who are looking for pretty much exactly this thing. So, you might even be able to help someone out with um just by sharing these, you know, scripts and stuff that you don't really feel like they're super valuable, but they could they could really be interesting for someone who's looking for this at exactly that point in time. So, I wouldn't discount that as an option, right? Like, if you have the stuff, bundle it up, put it on GitHub, put a open source license on it that you're comfortable with, and just see what happens. So, I guess to summarize that, um, if you have nothing on your gith GitHub, then get started. Put something out there. Um, it's usually not going to hurt you unless you're just copy and pasting stuff, right? It will be a good thing for you. And you can always build on that just to get started, build the habit, do that. Um, if you have um choice, you know, if you have the choice and you have a couple of things that you're thinking about uploading, then um, I think you can definitely get picky. So I think when I put together my kind of public, you know, open source portfolio, whatever you want to call it, I had started out with um a couple of small libraries that I um that I had written and I polished them to to a state where they they looked nice, right? I didn't know how useful they were going to be for people, but I wanted to have a certain quality level and kind of seat that account with, you know, I think three um projects that I launched this with initially. And that worked out pretty well. On the other hand, like looking back, I think you know if you upload a bunch of stuff that no one cares about, that's not going to hurt you either. And it's good for you because you're building the habit, right? So you if you're struggling with, you know, trying to be do things as as perfect as possible, then I would just try and get started because, you know, it actually took me a lot of time uh like preparing these projects and polishing them and going through all of that work. And I'm not actually sure if that ever really paid off, right? I might have gotten the same results just by getting started and then doing successive refinements. So that's kind of the you know the strategy that I'm leaning towards today. But um but yeah, definitely put it on GitHub. Like I think that's a TLDDR. Put those scripts on GitHub and I don't think it'll hurt you. It'll be good for you. It'll show that you want to give back to the community and it'll demonstrate um you know that you're willing to share code and and it's if it's original code, definitely put it up there. All right. So I hope this helped you out. I'm going to be working on a couple more videos like that one. You know, just answering questions that you share with me and um a lot of them are going to be about this, you know, whole aspect of developer marketing, how to build up your developer portfolio, how to um how to put up a good developer profile that's really going to speak for you and and will demonstrate your skills because I think that's super important. And um as developers, we're we're usually not great at at uh that, right? like at selling ourel or marketing oursel. So I feel like there's definitely something that could be improved and I you know benefited um hugely just from building up these skills. So I I want to give that back and um and share that with people. So be sure to subscribe if you want to see the next video to make sure you don't miss it and I'll talk to you soon. Thanks very much.