Skip to main content

Stop doing your CV in Word or LaTeX

· 3 min read


The future of CVs for engineers and developers lies within GitHub. This post discusses why GitHub profiles are becoming the new CVs and how they can provide a more comprehensive view of a candidate's skills and contributions.

The purpose of a CV is to summarize someone’s career, qualifications and education. As an engineer or developer, I strongly believe that the future of CVs lies within GitHub.

In fact, GitHub has realized this and they now allow you to create your own “profile page” by creating a repository with the same name as your GitHub username. E.g. https://github.com/DidierRLopes

In my humble opinion, this isn’t being talked enough. Previously, you needed a CV document to talk about your background, education, previous jobs and could rely on your GitHub profile to show your projects. With this update, CVs have become obsolete. When hiring for OpenBB, I put a lot of weight into the public GitHub of each engineer.

This is my current GitHub profile page.

image

My profile page is now much simpler since I’ve worked on my own personal website, but you can see here what my GitHub profile page looked like before. Creating your own personalized website for me is the next step after GitHub, as you can be as creative as you want while showing off your coding skills.

My repository is my way of showing the world what I can do on my own. From a blank sheet to a finalized project. Sometimes useful, sometimes for fun, but always with the intention to learn more and challenge myself.

The reason I think that GitHub profile’s are the CVs of the future for engineers/developers, is not only because you can now both talk about yourself in it and display your portfolio, but because of its open source nature.

With products like: https://ossinsight.io/analyze/DidierRLopes, you will be able to dive deeper on engineering skills than ever before.

image

Companies will be able to assess a candidate based on their open source work:

  • How do they interact with the community? What are their communication skills?
  • Do they practice teamwork? And mentor more junior developers?
  • Are they leaving comments in the code? Is their code readable in the first place?
  • What about testing? Are they following good practices?
  • What’s their time to reply to issues? Or to review PRs from peers?
  • Activity? What are their working hour patterns like?
  • …

Imagine a world where everyone develops in the wild. You can see everything and be part of any project. You have your own profile, you talk with others through issues or PRs, you build together. There is no gender, no race, no nationality,.. people are conneced through projects they believe in. In essence, this is the developer metaverse, and I’m all here for it.

image

EDIT: The reader should be aware that nowadays a properly formatted resume is still critical when added to a job board. This is because automated resume readers expect a certain format in order to recommend candidates to companies and vice-versa.

Hope you enjoyed this post. As always, any feedback welcome! 🙏