GitHub is the most effective way to supplement your individual job searching with a portfolio of what you have done and currently love to do, yes even if you are an operations geek instead of a software engineer. But, what are the common repos that allow you to never have a LinkedIn account at all?
<user>.github.io This is your personal GitHub Pages web site. Use it
as your landing page on the Web, which will primarily point to your
GitHub repo. You should eventually get your own domain name and point
it to this (for free). All other repos that have GitHub Pages will be
routes under this domain (ex: zet -> https://<user>.github.io/zet,
https://rwx.gg/zet)
<user> This repo contains the README.md file that is used for your
GitHub landing profile. It includes a .github sponsors file and
other information about your favorite repos and such. You can link a
welcome video as well. Consider this a supplement to your main web
landing page. Some of it will definitely overlap with your web repo.
dot Having a “dotfiles” repo has become something of a rite of
passage. Without it you cannot share and show off your cool terminal
and Vim configurations to the world. This is essential when people ask
you “how do you …” questions and you want to quickly get them to the
answer without fumbling around for where you save it. Always use the
setup or install script approach since that gives you the most
flexibility. Do not directly link it and avoid stupid tools like
stow that are completely unnecessary and less in your control.
Remember, you are showing off your scripting skills here, not your
knowledge of useless shit someone else made. Your dot/scripts
directory should have all your quick and dirty scripts, dot/snippets
is a good place to store your code snippets, vim, tmux, bash,
lynx and other application specific directories can have their own
setup scripts that are called from the main one and make it easy to
find. Having an installers directory makes it easy to keep track of
everything you need on install that tends to not fit into your pretty
package management solution.
zet This is your zettelkasten repo. Some people call it their
“second brain”. It is where you dump every thought you have (that you
can share publicly). Each directory is numbered after the GMT “ISO
second” and contains at least a README.md with the header title on the
first line. (Never any “front matter”.) Each README.md should be
relatively short and contain one specific topic. You might opt to
include one verbatim (4 space indented) section at the very bottom
containing one key = value label pair per line and a final line with
hashtags for better organization, meta data, and querying later. Read
more about Niklaus Luhmann’s Zettelkasten method for more about
organization.
lab This is the equivalent of a black notebook or “code book” or
coding sandbox like many veteran system administrators and hackers
have always used. This is where you put all our your successful (and
failed) explorations of different topics and technologies. We organize
everything into sub-directories for easy searching with find or
GitHub’s built in search capabilities. Each lab session can have it’s
own README.md or one that you continue to update with different logged
events. Write your discoveries and anything that you need to retrieve
quickly in your zet and refer directly to your lab in your Related
section. Other artifacts from your lab research will become
substantial repos of their own that are added to your cv as examples
of your work. You can choose to keep your lab public or private.
Either way, make sure to explain in the main README.md what you are
doing so people don’t mistake this exploration as anything serious.
cv This is were your resume goes, except we call it a CV because we
are going to put everything about your career (that can be public)
into it and create methods for trimming that content down into
specific resumes when needed.
~/Private This repo should not be on GitHub, but should instead be a
clone of a local “bare” (/media/myusb/priv.git) Git repo saved on an
external USB stick that can easily be grabbed at any time. Consider
using the ~/Private location for it so you can easily navigate to
it. This repo contains all your tokens, certificates, and other
secrets. Create an install or setup script (like dot) that is
meant to run after the dot install to overlay your system quickly
with the private and personal stuff. Consider maintaining a private
Private/zet in here as well for notes that are note suitable for the
public.
Other common repo naming conventions you might consider include:
cmd-<name> Consider using a cmd- prefix for all your significant
scripts that extend beyond what is practical to maintain in your
dot/scripts directory.
template-<name> Having a template repo for the types of repos you
tend to create often and quickly is nice to get you started without a
lot of scaffolding, for example, for your bigger bash scripts that
already have command-line tab completion in them.
Keep in mind when naming things in your GitHub repo that other people will want to fork it and if you pick too generic of a name that it will likely conflict with something else they have already forked. That’s their problem and not yours, but it doesn’t hurt.
🤬 For the love of God, stop creating camel-case repo names (ex: SomeThing) Prefer dashes over underscores as well. Remember every repo name becomes a potential URL.
Related:
gh CLI Tool Defaults to HTTPS20210809015157 GitHub Repo Directory Naming Conventions
#tips #git #github #lifehacks