I don't see how using PHP keeps you from having code reviews. I had code reviews at a job where I programmed in PHP. And as far as "modern" goes, it was probably 10 years ago. But anyway, I was mostly joking, obviously there are no code reviews, otherwise the stuff you were mentioning shouldn't exist.

Visual Studio 2015 C++ Compiler Secretly Inserts Telemetry Code Into Binaries

god every indian resume is exactly the same, giant list of technology they supposedly know, 4 pages of places they worked at I don't care about, no code samples, no github, no idea if they are any good at what we would want them to do. jfc.

It has never occurred to me to put code samples or a github on a resume.

I did finally convince a company to let me do a demo of my projects to them, in lieu of a programming test/whiteboard session. That was pretty cool.

Yes that is exactly what I'm talking about. Polymer does some weird scoping of the <style> tags inside it's component template files - designed to keep style changes confined to just that component. Not sure if that would work if just referencing an external CSS file from within the template.

Most of that technology is a two-week crash course they took at their offshore employer. Every offshore developer we got listed jQuery as a skill. But most of them were extremely junior developers.

Eventually we got some pretty good devs, after our bosses made a big stink about the crap they were giving us. Some of them are still here 4 years later and now becoming de facto owners of pieces of the website. Which is a little scary.

We still have some ridiculous ratio of like 2 offshore to 1 onshore. When the actual work is 80-90% done by the one onshore resource. But actually now that I think about it that got better too as offshore devs got more experience. Also we got a much better boss who knew how to get the most out of "our offshore partners". They are fairly productive now.

The problem is the whole model doesn't work financially unless you have at least 2-1 offshore/onshore. So during the early days - instead of just admitting the model isn't working, we had a bunch of offshore people sitting around either bored or slowly learning on the job. I think they were deliberately given a terrible network connection so it would slow them down.

Corporations man. Some C-level got a golf weekend out of it, and we have to turn our entire operations upside down for 2 years.

A lot of places ask for github. They want to see that initiative.

Back in the day I landed my first web programming job by just talking about a Java servlet application I had built on my own. I didn't even have to show anything, just talked about it.

It was a message board where people could bitch about ****ty products and companies - lol. This was 1998 or so. I was so raw I had no idea how to save actual posts. Can you put all that text in a database entry? I never actually got past that point.

Haha I won't say any more than you might find taking a stroll through the MSFT campus buildings in Bellevue surprising if you had access.

I think people putting their random **** on github makes github a worse place, but I've probably bitched about this before. So many times I've gone looking for something, found what looks promising on github (or sourceforge, whatever) and found some half finished piece of **** that probably never worked, and wasted hours trying to get it to work.

I mean, I guess people need a place to put their half finished crap but I wish there was a division between "this is stuff that I at least intend to present to the world as a finished usable project" and "this is where I dump stuff"

Anyway, I run my own repo server and all my code is stored there. I have 20+ years of code. I'm not really interested in putting anything on github.

I am also, coincidentally, a cranky old man.

Usually you can go by stars but I wasted a ton of time last week on this, https://github.com/lynndylanhurley/redux-auth. 649 stars and is a steaming pile of broken ****.

"That initiative" of reinventing (or copy and pasting) the wheel over and over and over again?
Out of 100 githubers, how many have anything unique on show?

Well obviously you would list the things on your resume that you are proud of and ready to talk about in the interview - not the fork you made of some existing repo so you could play around with it.

I'd imagine it's more of the "initiative" to do something on your own time to improve your skills instead of just being a nerd at work.

3 years ago I had this idea to make a jquery plugin that I'm sure has been made before because its incredibly obvious and it now has 23 stars magically? I have no idea. It even turns up on first page when you google my name.

Github is a huge joke. I pay no attention to it when evaluating resumes. I don't care what ****ty apps or hobby projects you've done. I want to see production stuff that you've shipped.

Grunch, a more effective way to search Github might be a way to increase productivity, perhaps in a more granular fashion. I use it for convenience and price more than anything else. I wish we used it where I work. Thinking about ponying up a little money to get some private repositories.

except the candidate will almost never own that code to show it to you. and in many cases, if they were working on internal tools, they won't even be able to show you the product. also, what qualities of their skill as programmers -- things like readability of code, architectural decisions, etc -- will you see in "production stuff" that you won't see in their hobby projects?

any decent hobby project eventually goes onto its own public production anyways right?

Many times github projects stop working because tooling changes and breaks previously working stuff. You can't really blame a developer for not continuing to maintain projects they might not need anymore.

The first half applies totally to me. The production stuff I have chucked out there (including code that is still used and built upon over 10 years after I have built the pieces) is not in my possession.
But - and this is the main reason keeping me from being a github profile - I do not feel the urge to showcase everything I know.
I am an introvert. Well, one that is able to get along with people very well for what that's worth. Pretty sure there is a name for such a person. Sorta functional introvert or something like that.

I have no desire to publicly showcase what a kickass programmer I am. I have very little patience or respect for "showtime" developers who collectively seem to oversell their abilities, ideas and approaches to problems. You know the type. Those that tend to end up in middle management. I do not want to be mistaken for one of those breeds.

And finally, the code snippets or logical approaches to subsets of problems that I have in my head and technically may (or may not) be my intellectual property are not functioning units in and by themselves. So having them as public pieces to judge my programming ability somehow seems off to me.

Having said all that, I am sure my resistance in and by itself is a telling point of data anyone can derive some judgement off of. Many of those conclusions probably far from flattering. On the flip side I have not been on a single project or worked for a single company that asked me to leave. Typically, I left due to boredom or finding a more interesting project to work on even though I have been offered a generous extension.

It's not so much that I "blame" people for anything, as it is that I find the trend of throwing your code on github to be largely useless.

I've actually considered from time to time making a VM-oriented code repository. Your code must have wide testing, it must include a build system, and basically we lock you into the last operating system version that your code successfully built and tested on. People can check out the code and/or enough information to create VM the code should build on. At least this way it should be possible to be able to try it out and see if it's even remotely useful.

I've especially considered doing this for myself. In my own code repo I have stuff I can't build because it depends on libraries that are no longer easy to get. For most of those libraries, I have source code, some of which is also currently hard to compile. Also, some library systems are notorious for being difficult to have 2 competing versions on the same system, and often I'll have 2 projects that use different versions of the same library.

OSX is especially bad about this - libraries compiled with clang don't seem to work with gcc and vice versa. (That plus having a really terrible 3rd party package manager and low availability of non-common libraries)

I think the original vision for github was to have many people contributing to open source projects. It's great for that and there are a ton of projects hosted on github with tons of people discussing improvements and submitting pull requests etc.

smells like fascism

I think github should be partitioned into brain dumps and projects. 99% of the stuff is 10 LOC that doesn't do anything at all.

If it matters, everything on my profile is real code that has been deployed to real servers and has been run. I don't think anyone cares though. I think my github was looked at by, at most, 5 potential employers. I'm guessing github is getting a pretty bad rep due to the brain dump base case.

Hey, if it makes the trains run on time, I'm for it

(yes, I'm aware that Mussolini's trains didn't actually run on time)

I think it would be super useful in github essentially included a piece of metadata which was something like "this thing does/does not work"