While a resume is an important component to showcase your abilities to potential employers, if you belong to the data science community, you might want to showcase your abilities in coding and other software capabilities in a way that does justice to your skills. A crucial part of data science jobs is to be able to code, and GitHub serves as a perfect platform to access the coding skills and display hands-on ability to solve problems.
There a few ingredients that make up for a good data science portfolio, some of them are a few medium-sized data science projects, showcasing the problem-solving abilities, which can be done by highlighting practical problems on GitHub.
As the importance of having a good GitHub profile has been stressed out so many times, there are often questions on what potential employers are looking for and what a good GitHub account generally looks like. This article covers the important aspects of a good GitHub profile.
Why Is GitHub Crucial?
Since many years, developers and coders have been accessed for their coding abilities based on a Q&A session and their ability to write or edit a short program in an interview setting. This may not always do justice to the candidate’s programming abilities. But with the rise of open source movement and the popularity of repository sites where programmers can show a portfolio of codes to potential employers, it has taken a key role in accessing candidates. GitHub is the most popular of it all.
While having a GitHub is not a deciding factor to land up a good developers job, a genuine GitHub portfolio lets potential employers have a quick glance into a candidate’s abilities. It showcases a candidate’s areas of interest and their contribution in the open source community. It shows what their code looks like, and how do they approach a problem. It shows how one candidate can be more engaged in the development and in open source than the other candidates.
7 Things To Have For A Good GitHub Portfolio?
Including good author info: This includes details such as candidate’s username, location, email address, current employer, etc. As this the first thing that potential employer notices, it is a good idea to have other relevant links such as personal blogs, websites, projects and other links that candidates can showcase.
Large followers: The number of followers that your portfolio has is a good indication of the work that you have done in the past. It showcases how fellow GitHub users engage with your work. Having large followers comes with the significant amount of work a candidate might have done on GitHub. More than 50 is usually a decent number.
Contribution graph: This indicates the number of contributions that a developer has made on other projects on the site. It showcases your keenness to explore other areas and shows activity levels in the coding community. The greener the graph is, the better is your contribution rate. Therefore it is always advisable to keep exploring.
Improving on stars: These are user ratings and may not be considered the only indicator for a good GitHub profile. Each project on GitHub user can earn stars from fellow users. It is a way of identifying how you have engaged in the community. 100 stars are usually considered decent but larger the better.
Forking and creating repositories: Repositories contains open-source development projects that the developer is hosting on GitHub and forking is the number of times projects have been copied. More the number of people who have forked, the greater is the popularity of that developer’s project in the GitHub community. A large amount of activity indicates that the developer is working on a popular project.
Writing employer-targeted code: Writing a code related directly to the employer’s business is a good way to catch their attention. It can showcase your coding abilities while demonstrating the interest you have in getting that job. The projects can be as simple as creating a visualisation of its data sets.
Other projects such as gaming or mobile apps: You may include projects around game development, that usually requires graphics-intensive artistic offering and showcase your understanding of key programming concepts quite well. The same goes for developing mobile apps if that is your area of interest for working.
Having mentioned the pointers above, the key idea is to create stronger projects for a strong GitHub profile. The recruiters pay attention in the areas such as the variety of projects that you have brought, completeness of the project, its functionality, readability and most importantly the information that it stores and displays.
