Introduction

Most of us who are successful in the IT industry, at some point in time, have benefitted from open-source projects that have saved us a lot of time and money. Many of you might have also reused code from repositories like GitHub, which is the most used online Git repository for developers as well as organizations to store, manage, and share their code.

One of the key things everyone can agree to is that today’s world is running and thriving due to open-source development. We can’t think of a world where projects like TensorFlow, Kubernetes, React, Node.js, Flask, OpenCV, Docker, PyTorch, and Jupyter Notebooks don’t exist. If you look at any of these projects, it’s not just large organizations that are driving these projects, but many individual passionate developers are contributing to these projects. Most developers who contribute to such open-source projects don’t even have a financial incentive, but they do contribute to the project nevertheless.

The ‘Nerdy’ way to prove you code (or contribute)

GitHub provides a contribution graph that sheds light on the type of contributor. It doesn’t provide insights into the quality of your contribution but certainly shows how regular and consistent you are when working on public projects, including open-source projects.

Do hiring managers care about your contribution graph? Maybe not. Do senior devs care about your contribution graph while interviewing you? Maybe, maybe not. However, the contribution graph plays a vital role in providing a glimpse into the vital stats about your consistency, familiarity with the tools, and the type of developer you are.

Let’s consider a few examples of contribution graphs below. As a recruiter or interviewer interviewing a junior developer, which developer would you prefer if you happened to look at their GitHub contributions? Would you prefer one with this contribution graph?

Or this one?

Or this one?

What about when you are interviewing someone as part of a campus-placement drive in the last year of the course, with the dev having no or minimal work experience? A fresher with a “greener” contribution graph may have a clear advantage.

While most junior devs and students may think the GitHub contributions don’t matter, they matter a lot in the subconscious minds of the recruiters and interviewers. If all things are the same on the resume, GitHub contributions can tilt the preference in your favour.

What counts as a contribution

GitHub contributions count a lot of activities, as shown in the graph. While Commits are obvious, creating issues, creating pull requests, creating a branch, contributing to discussions, and many other activities are counted towards the graph. Hence, while you engage in public projects on a regular basis, your contribution graph builds itself. You can even work solely on GitHub for learning and hobby projects to ensure a greener contribution graph.

Do you need to be a programmer for Contribution Graph to work in your favour?

In today’s world, if you are part of an IT job or undergoing an IT course, chances are you’ll be dealing with code in some form. For example, if you are into cybersecurity, you regularly use tools written in Python, Shell Scripts, and PowerShell. If you are into AI, ML, or Data Science, you regularly deal with Python code and ML models.

In fact, in today’s world, the development paradigms configuration-as-code and build-as-code deal with code regularly.

Hence, whether you consider yourself a core developer, a data scientist, a cybersecurity professional, an AI/ML professional, a quality assurance (QA) professional or a DevOps/DevSecOps person, you will deal with code in one way or another. So, why not do all your non-confidential work with GitHub as your main code repository. Another upside is that all your work is safe in GitHub, minimizing the loss in case of a hardware failure or loss of hardware.

Closing thoughts

There are many other ways to show your recruiters and interviewers that you are in the top 5% of all the devs. While GitHub Contributions is a cool way to do so, you can also do the same by contributing to a public technical forum like StackOverflow or even in Quora. You can participate in online challenges like HackRank, LeetCode, Topcoder, etc. You can also write technical articles in LinkedIn and Medium, where the focus is to tell others how to solve a problem or introduce them to new concepts. There are sure-shot ways to ensure your resume gets picked out of many job aspirants with similar profiles. So, why not do all these to get that extra mileage in your job search?

Also think of the GitHub contribution graph as a conversation starter, as a nerdy way to flaunt your code challenges and hackathon projects, and even bring it up as part of your next interview round to prove your coding abilities.