3 tools to showcase your GitHub profile
Tags: github, career, profile
Published: 2019-10-20 14:36:05

Like it or not, the first thing any recruiter will look at (just after googling your name) is your GitHub Profile. This somehow assumes that any developer should have a healthy contribution to a number of open source projects (or side projects) on your free time to be more employable (even if this may imply a less healthy work-life balance). There is even a tool, called <a href="https://codetrace.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">CodeTrace</a>, that claims to perform a real-time skills assessment of a developer’s expertise based on the GitHub profile.

To be clear, I'm not saying I like this or that you should follow this "trend". But if you are actively looking for a new job and do contribute to projects on GitHub, you may want to take this opportunity to stand out and improve your chances of getting selected by improving the visualization of your GitHub profile.

Beyond following these recommendations on how <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/90xmpw/how_to_prep_your_github_for_job_seeking/?st=jlqpyc7v&amp;sh=231d77f4" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">to prep your GitHub profile for job seeking</a> (add a real picture, pin projects with cool tech, remove useless forks...), there are a number of tools that read your GitHub profile and try to showcase it in a more attractive way. The three I liked the most are the following:
<h2>Profile summary for GitHub</h2>
Simply add your GitHub username and the <a href="https://profile-summary-for-github.com/search" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">profile summary for GitHub online tool</a> instantly gets you a number of charts summarizing your repositories, commits and stars, grouped by language.

See an example of the kind of visualization get in the featured image above, showing the data for my profile. You can also run it locally. And, even better, <a href="https://github.com/tipsy/profile-summary-for-github" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">the source code is available on GitHub</a> itself.
<h2>Sourcerer.io</h2>
<a href="https://sourcerer.io/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Sourcerer</a> requires to be authorized to access your GitHub data but in exchange, it is able to provide a more detailed perspective of your activity. See an excerpt of my GitHub profile visualized by Sourcerer.io
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://livablesoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/sourcererio.png"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-118602" src="https://livablesoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/sourcererio.png" alt="" width="703" height="891" /></a></p>
The first part looks quite similar to the profile generated by the previous tool but Sourcerer goes further than that and, for instance, it includes a "Fun Facts" section (even if I would appreciate to be able to drill down in these facts and see some data on how the tool reached that conclusion, I'm surprised by some of them).

<a href="http://livablesoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/funfacts.png"><img class="size-full wp-image-118603 aligncenter" src="https://livablesoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/funfacts.png" alt="FunFact from your GitHub profile generated by Sourcerer.io" width="500" height="447" /></a>

Sourcerer lets you edit your profile to change/complement some of the generated data. You can then use your own sourcerer URL to share the (edited) profile with whoever you want to. The <a href="https://github.com/sourcerer-io/sourcerer-app" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">sourcerer app</a> is also open sourced. And as a bonus, looking at the other tools created by Sourcerer, I also liked this <a href="https://github.com/sourcerer-io/hall-of-fame" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">widget to generate a readme file thanking your project contributors.</a>
<h2>GHUser</h2>
<a href="https://ghuser.io/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Ghuser.io </a>aimed to enhance the existing profile visualization in GitHub. Some of the things they add on top of the standard GitHub profile display are all the repos you have contributed, a different repo sorting, transferring stars to users, bringing avatars, detecting frameworks (and not only languages,...). Read about all of them <a href="https://github.com/AurelienLourot/ghuser.io" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">here</a>. Once ghuser created your enhanced profile, it looked like this one

<img class="aligncenter" src="https://github.com/AurelienLourot/ghuser.io/raw/master/docs/screenshot.png" alt="Example GitHub profile visualization improved by ghuser" width="1045" height="891" />

Unfortunately, the <a href="https://github.com/ghuser-io/ghuser.io/issues/190" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">project has been recently discontinued</a> and they have stopped onboarding new users. Stil, I think it's worth mentioning because as they said, their goal was not so much to build an alternative to the GH profile itself but to push GitHub to adopt some of their ideas in order to get better profiles for everybody.
<h2>CV Generators from GitHub data</h2>
I focused on tools that try to display your GH profile in a more attractive way but if what you need is to generate a CV out of your GitHub data, there are<a href="https://github.com/topics/resume-builder" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"> plenty of tools for that</a> as well.

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