I think the title should be "GitHub Profile Readme Templates". I was confused why every one was a person's resume instead of what I was expecting, a template for documenting a project.
The ones I saw all shared the sensibility of something written in Comic Sans MS using the <blink> tag.
It’s actually worse because at least blink tags are confined to browsers. Now you have developers putting emojis in log statements for whatever reason.
You could probably do the same with the blink ANSI escape sequence if your logs are getting displayed in the terminal. Though I’d recommend you not to use that particular escape sequence...ever.
The integrity of this being a project to "collect awesome readmes" is somewhat undone by people adding their own readme. It's made worse as it seems each submission is accepted as long as it meets formatting criteria, without any standard for quality. I could see this being a great resource if it were actually a collection of readmes for various projects (and sure, profiles as well) deemed excellent and worth sharing by a single, objective person or group. But as it is, this project is not worth our note.
From browsing around, I did not see any that would quality as a "template", meaning a general-purpose pattern. Each is very specific to the person who submitted it.
But I wouldn't go so far as to say it's "not worth our note". The project does have merit as a collection of READMEs - I did get some ideas for my own. It's just not curated enough (or at all), to filter out one-off creations and select what's actually useful as a template.
> But as it is, this project is not worth our note.
I don't necessarily agree, as what is needed most right now is inertia and having this turn into a dumping ground, serves quite a bit of value...for now anyways. It's much easier to curate when everything is in a single location.
What I think they can do a much better job of is classifying the submissions. If you take a look at the files changed heat map/tree below:
the most active categories are "multimedia" (48 versions) and "short-and-sweet" (46 versions), where many in multimedia should be in short-and-sweet. The project can probably benefit from sub folders.
So another words, if the projects progresses (far) beyond it's current state, it will be worth of note. I agree! But I disagree that accepting everything is the best path to get there. As it is, it's burned away any interest I have in following this repo and checking in for inspiration when needed.
> It's much easier to curate when everything is in a single location.
That's why we have early adopters to bring it to a more universally accepted state :-)
This project is quite interesting from a pure analytics point of view. It's only about 3 weeks old, and it already has 4k stars and its trajectory is quite steep as shown below:
This project also has a healthy number of new pull requests so clearly something is working. What would be interesting, would be to cross reference the rate at which people are "starring" with the growth of the project.
Given the limited data (3 weeks), it would be hard to say if taking a more aggressive curating approach would hurt or help the project.
> That's why we have early adopters to bring it to a more universally accepted state :-)
Who are the early adopters? People that want to have their profile featured, or people hoping to find inspiration?
> This project is quite interesting from a pure analytics point of view
> This project also has a healthy number of new pull requests so clearly something is working
> cross reference the rate at which people are "starring" with the growth of the project.
I don't see how any of these metrics reflect the quality of the service. If it were a resume collector, then I'd be in complete agreement: Things are going fantastically. But the way it's branded, it's supposed to help people find inspiration for their own readmes, and quantity of examples is not a positive factor in that service's quality.
If I were using this to find a template that worked for me, I would want to have to look through a minimum number of submissions to find one, not trudge through endless submissions that have little to no appeal.
Additionally, I'm seeing profiles that are copies of each other in the listings. Perhaps it would be appropriate to remove the "template" from the repo's name, as it isn't providing _templates_, just profiles. If it were, duplicates would not be accepted, and the examples would have sample data (eg "John Doe john@example.com" rather than people's actual info.
> I don't see how any of these metrics reflect the quality of the service.
This is why it is important to cross reference the stars with the state of the project. What if 90% of the starring occurred within the last week? If this is so, it would indicate many felt this repository provided value based on 2/3 of the repos history.
It is important to note that I am not discrediting your opinion, what I'm trying to say is, the numbers might show many do not share in your opinion. Also, calling this a "service" doesn't make much sense, since I don't think the repo maintainer is being paid to provide a specific value that benefits you.
The README pretty much invites you to submit a template with no real barrier to submission. Your "Awesome" may well be different than many others "Awesome".
Hey, I am the creator of the repo, I just found this thread. I agree with all the points mentioned above. Right now the repo is not in its best curated state and also that I am accepting duplicate submission.
I too think that there needs to be a proper filter. Just bear with me for a couple of days, I have already planned to change the format and the current state of the repo, it's just that I am kind of preoccupied with some work. It's also worth noting that people are actually finding some inspiration for their own readme, so I feel it's working out positively for some.
I created this repo for myself and did not expect it to blow up like this. Thanks for the valuable suggestions though, do let me know what else could be done to improve it :D
The strangest commonality I noticed is that many of those templates stress social media involvement and not code repositories. The more visually elaborate a template becomes the more true this pattern appears.
I don’t really care what people’s social media accounts are. I am interested in what projects they author or contribute to, so for much of the content is way off focus. Maybe it’s just because I’m old.
It's reinforcing the popularity contests everyone on the net has turned in to in the past 20 years. I miss the old internet and IRC without profiles and "karma".
I really like profile READMEs that are powered by GitHub Actions (see https://simonwillison.net/2020/Jul/10/self-updating-profile-... ) - this collection doesn't seem to have a way of sharing those yet, which would be great since getting the Actions YAML right can be tricky to figure out at first.
I find these interesting. One the one hand, cool, on the other: you could have had any of this, with even more flexibility, on a personal homepage at any time. What about it being the GH profile triggers this?
Wow, I should find a job I’d be happy staying at for a few decades so that I don’t have to deal with this nonsense come hiring time. Is this really what we want recruiting to become?
One important factor is how fast that 6 upvotes happened and from who. If it got posted and got 6 upvotes within a few minutes and that from "proper" accounts it is on the front page. If it has the same amount but it takes 30 min then not. At least from my personal experience.
The ones I saw all shared the sensibility of something written in Comic Sans MS using the <blink> tag.