GitHub as a portfolio
The most followed profiles are short and clear at the top, and let pinned repos with live demos do the talking. Skip badge walls, stats cards and typing animations; they're rare on the profiles people actually follow.
Steps
- Decide what's public. List every repo. Anything with private tools, personal data, client work or job search material stays private. Duplicates of a live site can go private too.
- The profile README (a public repo named exactly like the username):
- A banner or a strong first line: name, role, and the one sentence that says what you do.
- Links: site, LinkedIn, contact, resume, with tracking tags so you can see what GitHub sends you.
- Selected work with images, each linking to the full case study.
- "Things you can copy": the repos people can use.
- How you work, and a short experience list.
- Make repos worth pinning. Each pinned repo has a clear description, topics, a README with a picture in the first screen, and a live page when there's something to try (GitHub Pages on the main branch). Up to six pins: lead with the work, then the most useful things to copy.
- Share images. A 1280 by 640 image per repo (title, one line, a real screenshot), uploaded in each repo's settings, so links look good on LinkedIn and Slack.
- Profile settings. Name, short bio, company, website, social links, a real avatar, and private contributions counted on the graph. Don't fake activity; real private work already shows.
- Privacy check before every push. Run the privacy-scan skill on all images, GIFs and PDFs, check commits use a no-reply email, and lock the wiki to collaborators.
- Turn on two factor authentication. It's the biggest risk to a public profile.
Don't
- Don't invent work, employers or results. Concept projects are fine when labelled as concepts.
- Don't publish anything you haven't read, including old recordings.