[Discuss] Aspiring Grumpy Unix Admin

[admin]

Hi Rick!

Thanks for chiming in and adding a lot of context.


Rick Moen via Discuss wrote on 2022-06-27 02:34:

> Quoting admin via Discuss (discuss at lists.bclug.ca):
> 
>> Do you have a github account?
>> 
>> Are you reasonably competent with the git command?
>> 
>> You'll find both beneficial. Github is the place for tech
>> portfolios.
> 
> That's an opinion.
> 
> A different perspective is that it's a slightly pushy proprietary 
> software business, based in San Francisco and lately owned by
> Microsoft Corporation, that somehow conned a lot of people into
> confusing it with git, the (backing, in GitHub, Inc.'s case) data
> store.
If people are confusing GitHub with git, they haven't paid any attention 
what-so-ever.  If GitHub contributed to that, then "boo".


And, as I mentioned, I host all my git repos locally and push to github 
with git commands as a secondary or tertiary remote. Origin is always 
local & self-hosted.


GitHub does add the ability to search for repositories that one might 
not otherwise find (Remember SourceForge? Ugh.)


And, the ability to submit patches (Pull Requests) is very handy. 
Mailing lists kind of suck for that, IMHO.


Then again, Github's Issue tracker encouraging emoji infestation really 
chaps my ass and almost makes email look preferable.




 > I've used git for about as long as git has existed, have been a senior
 > Ops guy for decades, and have been a member of the Linux community
 > since 1993

That's great, and I have no doubts about your qualifications - I've seen 
them myself.


However, for those without a sufficient background, maybe trying to 
break into the field, GitHub is the single most important account one 
can have, next to an email address that isn't @hotmail or @aol.

Unless one can point to a résumé with lots of relevant experience, one 
needs something to show.


It seems that virtually everyone in charge of hiring these days want to 
see some kind of "proof of work", a portfolio of some kind, and want to 
see a GitHub account for that.

Whether they look at code quality, PR counts, types of projects 
contributed to, or languages used, etc., it's where most 
developer-wannabe's can get that kind of visibility.




It's both sad and kind of funny that Serge thinks GitHub *is* git. 
Sure, they're fairly tightly intertwined, as evidenced by being able to 
push to GitHub repos entirely with the git command (once bare repo is 
created on GitHub).

And yeah, I too despise signing up for yet another online account.


And, I recall the concern over Microsoft buying GitHub (for 
$7,500,000,000 USD! - honestly, good for the founders, they made 
something useful that someone over-paid for).

So far MS has been decent stewards as far as I can tell.

Several / many people de-camped to GitLab, but I haven't noticed any impact.



I say all this as someone who created an account in ¿2017?, put one 
little script there, then ignored GitHub until earlier this year.


Until I needed some kind of portfolio in the search for a new job / 
career change.



Anyway, very interesting story re: TLDP. I had no idea how that had 
played out, and it's a shame he deleted the CVS repo and can't (*wont*) 
take your patches.



Ciao for now.