Is it advisable to make github project available as public?

Career Advice
1

As a developer, potential employer might want to consider you for employment as a result of your beautiful portfolio.

Therefore, developer tends to set their project work as public on github. Meanwhile setting them to public may also have it’s own demerit.

Now, the question is: “is it advisable for developers to set their project work as public on github?”

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2

Can you specify?

If your code isn’t a trade secret and doesn’t contain sensitive or private information then there is no reason to hide it, in my opinion.

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I think, other developers can as well clone your project. Although, I’m not sure and I think this keeps confusing me bcos I’m new to git and github :slightly_smiling_face:

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yes, they can, and you can clone other people projects.
But that’s kinda the point of open source, people clone a
project, fiddle with it, and propose improvements to the original version

anyway, you can have private repositories in the premium version of github

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Alright, thanks for reply. I understand better :slightly_smiling_face:

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You can have them at any pricing level, they’re free, it just limits collaborators to 3

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You should be careful about what you include in your check-in. It is insane how many Github projects include passwords or other sensitive info. You might want to take a look at how to use a .gitignore file to make sure that sensitive files are ignored when checking in your project.

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This generally isn’t a problem worth worrying about, especially when it comes to stuff like portfolios or side projects created for the sake of learning.

Open source is built on the fact anyone can clone/copy the code. At the same time you shouldn’t “open source” your secure secrets (like database passwords), nor should you open source your entire application stack if your goal is to make money with it.

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9

Thanks for reply. Your post has a lot of helpful tips.

10

make sure not to put any true credentials out there in your code.

ie using a real username/password for accessing throwaway databases thinking that no one will see it.

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As a developer in waiting I was pretty happy when one of my projects was cloned a few weeks ago :+1:

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