Having a nice looking Github profile is a huge plus for getting freelance work and introducing yourself to the world. On top of that, it doesn't take much work to set one up because there are numerous tools that you can make use of to have a snazzy profile without much effort. Recently, I took the time to actually put together a nice looking profile and thought I would share some of the things I learned. Let's take a look at 3 basic parts of a profile.
Step 1: Make a Purty Header
First things first, it is always good to greet visitors to your page. After all, they took the time to visit your page. The least you can do is say hello. Luckily, there is an easy to use tool for creating nice looking header messages.
Capsule Render
Kyechan99 has a nice header maker with plenty of options to choose from. You can define colors, widths and add any kind of text you want. They even have a handy wavy animated banner (I used the type=waving option), which is what I personally went with for my profile page.
Now, of course if you do any kind of UI/UX work or CSS animation work that you want to show off, this is the perfect place to use something more involved in order to show perspective employers or collaborators your skills.
It is also a good idea to write a very brief description of yourself. This should typically be 2-3 sentences and to the point. This is your elevator pitch if, you will.
And give people a way to get a hold of you or find out more about you. Personally, I posted links to my Twitter, Dev.to, and LinkedIn. I feel like that gives people 3 very different ways to get a hold of me, depending on what they are looking for. Here is a useful repo that contains most of the main icons.
Step 2: Make a Bullet List of your Experience
After a quick introduction, it's important to make a quick list of the tools and languages you have experience with. I personally broke these out into some common categories so visitors can quickly scan over the page and see if I can help them with anything.
I personally made an unordered bold list to title each of the categories of tools/language I use. After that, I added some badges of the key languages and tools that I feel like I have a decent amount experience with. There is a very handy list of shield.io badges with accompanying markdown available at this repo.
Step 3: Add Some Stats
You should show off the fact that you are in fact an active developer. There are a handful of very good stat widgets that can show the number of commits and PRs you make as well as what languages you most commonly use on Github.
You can find a few different stat widgets on anuraghazra's repo. They are fairly customizable and allow you to hide stats that may not be that flattering or could be misleading.
Summary
It's important to have at least a small business card available on Github, especially if you work with a lot of other developer's on open source projects. Having a good Github profile can help ease networking and connect with other like-minded developers.
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