Or people could self police and add notes or read me files. Like, if I'm doing something for Odin or school or another book, I'll note that it's an exercise from whatever source. (Chapter 2, Android programming by big nerd ranch, for example)

Why are you putting your version of chapter 2, android programming, on gitlab? What's the point? Maybe I should post my chemistry notes from high school?

Working is pretty murky. Of course this code works on Arch Linux with all bleeding edge architecture and improperly configured system settings. It'll work great on CentOS 6 as long as you uninstall sudo.

if part of what your job will be in the future includes sharing your chemistry notes online, then sure, that makes sense. Part of programming these days likely includes using Git, and there's not a lot of other good ways to get practice with the tool if you're not using it. :shrug:

So let's put all those things on svnhub, too? What about bugtrackerhub? And while we're at it, put it all on techdochub, too.

I've had companies contact/recruit me (Google, etc.) based solely on my GitHub profile/activity. I don't think that's useless.

You sort of have this already, but not quite. You could always look at travis badges for passing tests.

Ultimately it doesn't say that much since it depends on how well written the lib's tests are, but it's better than nothing because usually a repo that has bothered to add tests/travis is probably a few notches above one that did not.

My 10 second criteria for checking repos is:

1. Does it have tests? (if not, is there an exceptional reason why not?)
2. How good are the docs?
3. How many contributers?
4. When was the last commit?
5. How many stars / forks?
6. What do the dates look like for open issues?

If you take these 6 things into account, you can usually pick winners. Winners as in, the lib you want to use probably works, or if not, you'll get an answer if you open an issue to report a bug.

I've used hundreds of assorted libs in half a dozen web framework techs and I've only had 1 case where a lib I wanted to use was completely crippled, but it also didn't pass my "6 steps to victory for finding good libraries on github" test.

It really sucks that my node framework repo looks like it's not being used because it has few stars, issues and commits. When in reality we're using it in multiple gigantic apps and I know a few devs who left who are using it. I can't figure out how to get any traction beyond that. I tried hacker news and reddit and it just died other than my friends.

I'm going to add a disclaimer to the readme that says this is still very much in active use - it just hasn't needed any fixes for a while. Victim of my own success - lol.

Disclaimer is a great idea, especially if your last commit is old. That's the heuristic I typically use for "active," assuming no notes at the top of the README to the contrary.

You'll have to update your disclaimer fairly often, or I basically won't believe you. A note from 2010 that says "we totes use this every day" doesn't really mean anything.

Does anyone actually look at the downloads on NPM? Because that will show we totes use this every day.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/nodulejs

All the time when evaluating whether or not to use something..

Ok I added this to the top of my readme in my repos.

Think that will help?

bot downloads make those numbers unreliable. i suppose if there were thousands last week, that would be meaningful

One of my repos gets cloned about 3 times a week, but haven't had a commit in about a month. Regardless, never had a pull request, which is irritating. I'm truly interested in knowing if people are having problems building the system. I feel like, if you can't get something to work, send an email or do a pull request.

Annoying popularity contest. How can you get any downloads if you don't get noticed, and how can you get noticed w/o any downloads? I need to be a better self-promoter.

eh I figure if I make something good people will just show up to use it but we'll see here when I launch my game for open beta/kill my robots.txt blocking on Wednesday. Will um post it to reddit I guess.

Polymer sure does like to fail silently. Since the whole thing is HTML-based you'd think it could at least warn on broken html or css. Maybe I'm just spoiled with jade (for the html, I rarely work with css).

At least this one only took me a few minutes to spot rather than a couple hours like my style tag gaffe.

Are you using an "aware" editor? Does it tell you about stuff like bad closing tags?

Seems fine to me. They offer free cloud storage so why not.

Not enough apparently. I have sublime and Emmet. Do I need some kind of html lint?

I got my first job as a developer a couple of months ago. I found out the quality of my teammates and inhouse code is pretty bad:
- Global variables
- No functions, just includes/inlines
- If there is a function, it has 5-7 global vars it depends on, instead of params
- PHP with no frameworks.
- SQL queries in the middle of every page
- No tests.
- Everything is coupled with everything.
- Copy pasted code.

I have no degree, I had 1 year of freelancing experience up to this point. Most people on my team learned programming on the job, so they don't know any better or have no way of knowing. There is one "Senior" member, who is on his 2nd-3rd year of Computer Science. He is not clueless. He implemented source control, so he worries about best practices. He did a project with classes and functions. But the rest of his code, he doesn't bother. It's just a little bit less of a mess than my other teammate's. I don't my manager was correct in calling him senior. He never worked in a big project before. All he ever did was this mess. Not sure how much/ if I can learn from him.

Ideally I'd move on to a more skilled environment, so I can improve rather than stagnate. But there might be a gap between my (apparently) higher than average skills, and how an employer might assess my skills. How do can I find a company that looks for talent and is looking for talent? How can we prove to each other that we have talent?

Should I just suck it up until I have some experience here before I move on? Should I try to do some open source library/ contribute to existing ones in my spare time? Should I start actively looking and leverage whatever experience I have right now?

Well the problem with HTML validators with custom web components elements is that they're false triggering all over the place. I tried the W3CValidator in sublime and that failed. There's an HTML tidy linter but it's a pain to install and I'm almost sure it will do the same thing.

Does Sublime have snippets?

Suck it up. I'm on a team at least as bad as yours (but everyone on my team has over a decade of exp). They code like its their first year on the job. Copy and paste everywhere. Masses of duplicate logic. Etc. Example sort of thing I've seen pretty regularly...

While there is nothing functionally wrong with that, its absolutely braindead moronic to do it like that. All the extra arguments to the callback in _.map are also unnecessary in this case but they include them anyway.

I'm working on some Rails stuff right now. Once I feel comfortable in that, I will be moving on. Nobody on my team takes pride in their work. I can't be surrounded by people who write "good enough for now" code.

"Good enough for now" code is very common and in reality is often encouraged by management. There are time constraints on every project so that is where a lot of it comes from. "Organizational Culture" is also a major contributing factor. I think that is what you and LoveThee have the biggest issue with in your current roles. That is a good thing actually that you have issues with the status quo. Finding organizations that embrace innovative approaches is not that easy. Many say they do but they actually don't. People for the most part like to stay in their comfort zones and thus tend to resist different approaches than the ones they are comfortable with because they are "good enough" for them. Face it though, the process of learning can be and often is difficult. Many people resist it.

When I join a team I try to push the envelope a little bit at least right away in various ways to see where the boundaries are. I mean there is always room for improvement. I'm currently working in an organization where upper management has decreed that Agile is the software development process to be used. The transition has been going on for a year but in reality it is Agile in name only. At the very least middle management is holding on to the waterfall process kicking and screaming all the way and I suspect upper management isn't all that committed to the change. There is so much wasted time inherent with their waterfall process to begin with and all their Agile process has done is add overhead to it. I'm a senior level developer so my ideas carry some weight. There are a lot of things that could be improved, pushing for one improvement at a time.