What I don't understand is why can't somebody love to code and not maintain a public github repo? Sometimes you want to keep things private-- it shouldn't have to mean the best stuff you developed has to be on github in order for you to get a good job as a programmer. It's on the technical interviewer to test out programmer's skills. Too many non-technical recruiters these days are passing on candidates because they don't have a big github repo. That's a cop out and an insult to the profession.
No joke. If I code for a living, usually I want to spend my free time doing something OTHER than coding. The projects I DO work on in my free time are for me - usually silly little things (maybe in a new lang that I'm playing with), and not indicative of standard of code quality I produce in the "real world."
In my opinion most programmers who use github should have at least two accounts, one carefully crafted to match some tradeoff between their current work environment and future work aspirations and heavily linked to their real name, and the other pseudonymous with no real name containing their real hobbies and code.
There is a substantial danger in being pigeonholed and eliminated because of some weekend hobby project three years ago "Oh we can't hire that guy, he does low level hardware driver work on microcontroller RFID devices and we need a DBA" Outside SV and NYC there is no shortage of coders and you'll get rejected for nothing.
I personally like to do gardening, home improvement, spend my time with my family over the weekends. My normal work time keeps me deep into coding and I just don't want to do 100% of my week.
