3 tips to make your GitHub profile stand out
GitHub is the world’s largest software development community/platform with more than 65 million users. Your profile there is probably one of the first Google search results — if not the top one — when someone looks up your name. It’s part of your social media presence, so why not give it a little bit of love ❤️.
Here are three easy tips to improve your GitHub profile.
Create a profile README
If you haven’t done it yet, this is the first step: Create a special public repository with a readme file that will be displayed on your profile. The name of this repository needs to match your GitHub username. My profile repo for example is https://github.com/nleiva/nleiva.
You can add anything you’d like to be presented to your visitors in this readme file (README.md). A greeting message, talk about yourself and your interests, highlight your work, etc.
In the example below, there is a list of blog posts. To make it a bit less boring, you can even use emojis. Check out this Emoji cheat sheet.
Images can be added as well if you’d like. Use html code to align them left, right, or center.
<img align=”right” src=”https://.../">Add badges
Social
You can add badges that link to your social media accounts. Shields.io provides legible badges, which can be included in your GitHub readme. Go to https://shields.io/category/social to personalize yours.
Counter
Another alternative is to add a counter to your profile.
Take inspiration from others
It’s perfectly fine to copy & paste from other user profiles. Get some ideas from awesome-github-profile-readme I, awesome-github-profiles II or creative-profile-readme.
If you want to make this as simple as possible, take a look at this GitHub profile readme generator.
Conclusions
GitHub profiles can be more informative and fun. Keep in mind we are just scratching the surface. You can really take it to the next level by leveraging GitHub actions for example to make the content dynamically generated. The sky is the limit!
