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Pin repositories to your GitHub profile

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82 pointsdavisonio26 comments

I got excited thinking this was a fix to the main index page (when logged in) since that is so onerously terrible, but alas it is not.

I regularly contribute to a handful (like 3) different repos, and occasionally a few more (maybe 2 or 3 more). I have to manually type in the repo name every time because the main feed is so useless when you're in an organization. We have 100+ repos, so that main feed is a bunch of things I don't care about, and the sidebar list is some random list of repos I have contributed to.

Main page should prominently show me links to my most recently contributed-to repos and my open PRs, but it is so worthless and generic that I get annoyed when I accidentally don't go directly to the repo I need.

And don't get me started on the organization main page, what a stupidly pointless page.

</rant>

From the main page, even listing the repos of one of your organizations is hard. Most of the time I just go to a repo in the "repositories you contribue to" sidebar and then click on the name of the team. Not sure if there's another way with as many (or fewer) clicks.

They got rid of the second column of repositories you've contributed to. Not that it's a big thing to me but it makes the layout look weird.

edit: realized they merged the two columns.. yeah i hope they go back and split it up again.

I hope they revert this; the columns visualized decidedly different metrics (personal projects vs community contribution) and each was useful in its own right. Pinning each section separately would have made more sense.

Depends, IMO. I got a few projects which I for various reasons (simplify collaboration, or have a neutral home, amidst multiple parties (me, research group, few virtual orgs etc)) forked off into separate github orgs, but still was the main developer for. Then, the separation didn't feel optimal.

Ditto—I feel like this is more optimized for the use case where people don't have 'personal' repos and want to give more weight to contributions to other projects.

But what it does (imo) is make it look like someone who's only ever submitted one patch to any project be able to put that project as one of their primary 'pinned' projects. So now it's harder for people to tell if something like whether I am a primary contributor to the `ansible/ansible` project, or if I'm just sticking it in my pinned list for vanity reasons.

Same, the 2-column layout shows twice as much info and separates your personal repo's with the repo's you're a major contributor to - hope they provide an option where we can out-out of this change, showing most popular personal repo's and repo's you contribute to was just fine the way it was.

It's unfortunate that they removed the second column. The clear distinction between "projects I started" and "projects I help with" was wonderful. And it only fits half as many now. Being able to pin repositories is nice, but not worth the loss of the columns for me.

+1 for two columns.

It would be great, if you can pin your contributions also. For example, If I create organization for experimenting with stuff and contribute a lot to its repos, my contributions are overwhelmed with experimental stuff. Kinda sad.

Not really. For instance, in my profile [1] I started two somewhat popular projects, however since I started them as independent "organizations" (as should be the case in this situation) they were in "projects I help with". It totally made it look like it was a one-time off contribution, while it's not the case.

[1] https://github.com/franciscop/

I can make a one-time off contribution to a big project (I did actually, with React) and pin it to the top. With the two columns, it didn't show up because I have more contributions in other projects. Both sides have their pros and cons.

Yes, but when it says "Projects contributed to" as a different section from "Popular repositories" it looks like the contributed ones are NOT your own.

When it says "Pinned projects" it doesn't mean "My Repositories" nor "Contributed to", it just means I chose to show them. If I choose to show them it means that:

1. I contributed a lot to it so I want to show it. 2. I want show a project as mine when I just did a small contribution. This is easy to caught.

So you have a choice of showing your work vs trying to cheat, while in the old one it was just everything mixed. I for one welcome to be able to choose and think in total is a positive change, but I understand some people worry that other people "cheat".

I'm quite disappointed that they nixed the second column.

- Two columns meant more information to show off and to glean about someone else.

- Two columns forced people to have short descriptions for their projects, just like commit titles.

Would it have been that hard to just make it "pin 10 repos" or "pin 5 personal + 5 external"?

Tried it, now my profile page 404s when logged out. Did they change some other "privacy" related settings?

(Also not a big fan of reducing the display from 10 to 5 repos, but what can you do...)

Same here. Seeing people on Twitter saying the same.

Edit (21:55Z): And it's working again for me.

This is something I've wanted for a while and I think it's a good improvement. The loss of the two columns sucks though, because I have more than 5 projects that I'd really like to showcase. I'm very active in open source.

I don't know how I feel about these past few changes. Github is trying to compete more and more with LinkedIn. My user page is now becoming a resume, complete with summary and carefully chosen projects. Where does this end?

Adding a short bio section + link curation =/= becoming the bloated mess of spam, useless business drivel and shotgun-style recruiter messages that LinkedIn is.

Exactly, I want more power for my programming projects, most of which are open source. Github is moving slowly into business, which is basically opposite the reason that people started using it.

I didn't start using Github to have a neat resume to hand out to companies, I started using it because it allows me to collaborate in open source projects in an easy way without much overhead. And I've loved doing projects for fun there.

I just hope it doesn't become Linkedin, as I recently closed my account there.

Awesome! I had this problem that my side-project (a vagrant box for Go development in vim) got more stars than my main and favorite project (thing written in Go). This will fix that.

Cue people pinning React or any other popular library because they submitted an issue or fixed a typo once.

It was shown on their profiles even without pinning.

Yeah but if they contribute more to other stuff it replaces one time only repos.

What is the logic for which repositories show up in the available list? I tend to create opensource projects with their own organization. I see some repositories within these organizations present, some not - even when I'm the primary contributor. Very strange.

This new update sucks, I much prefer the previous layout.

interesting how they 'fix' problems people don't care about, and don't fix problems people do care about.

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