from Hacker News

Dear GitHub: Please let us sort our projects

by oddshocks on 4/10/14, 3:30 PM with 68 comments

• by jnbiche on 4/10/14, 5:16 PM

  Strongly agree. Now that Github is being used as a de facto CV, it's really important for our Github page to show our strongest projects first.

  If some silly project I contributed to 4 years ago pops up first on my Github page, most potential clients and/or employers are not going to make the effort to scroll through pages of projects to find the projects most representative of my current abilities.

  On the bright side, this exact phenomenon has led me to go back and clean up a few projects of mine that became unexpectedly popular. Now they have documentation and updates that I probably wouldn't have made otherwise (although their popularity alone also propelled me to make these changes).

• by blatherard on 4/10/14, 4:19 PM

  I just experienced the other side of this problem yesterday. I was checking out a job applicant who had a lot of repositories and I couldn't easily figure out which ones really mattered. Fortunately, he also had his own portfolio site. The github profile was effectively useless.

• by patcon on 4/10/14, 4:25 PM

  Maybe open an issue here: https://github.com/isaacs/github

  Visit this link after the one above to find a github easter egg :) https://github.com/contact

• by scribu on 4/10/14, 3:56 PM

  Yes, please!

  I would also be happy with just being able to create groups on the repositories tab. Nothing fancy, just being able to say: "Hey, these are my old WordPress plugins; these are my esoteric projects etc."

• by yaddayadda on 4/10/14, 5:06 PM

  Another GitHub nuisance: I'm a huge fan of pinboard.in and use the Firefox popup bookmarklet quite a bit but github repositories [1] won't let me bookmark them with the bookmarklet. GitHub repositories are literally the only pages I've found the I haven't been able to use the pinboard bookmarklet, and it's been that way with every single GitHub repository I've tried to pinboard.

  [1] Strangely github.io pages bookmark just fine.

• by jordigh on 4/10/14, 4:11 PM

  This is one thing that bugs me a lot about how centralised Github becomes: if you want any changes, you have to resort to begging with blog posts.

• by ozh on 4/10/14, 3:39 PM

  And tag them also. And also tag our gists.

• by randunel on 4/10/14, 4:19 PM

  He sounds like my project manager, when adding a new feature just by mentioning it during a demo, and sees our faces:

  "What I'm asking wouldn't be hard at all"

  :))

  Unless you're intimately involved with the project or a guru in similar projects, you've got no idea whether any feature would be hard / simple, time-consuming/interesting.

• by cwalcott on 4/10/14, 4:08 PM

  If GitHub profiles really are becoming the "new resume", I think users are need more control over them. Certainly sorting projects is a good start.

• by pwelch on 4/10/14, 3:52 PM

  Another missing sorting option that blows my mind is sorting issue tags.

  I find it hard to quickly search Issues tags when they are in no specific order. I would settle for letting me drag them in an order I want rather than order they were created.

• by rkuykendall-com on 4/10/14, 5:19 PM

  A lot of these solutions sound very complex. Sorting, tags, categories, grid, trees...

  How about just showing my repos that I starred at the top? Or if you want to get slightly more complex, a "Feature" button similar to "Star."

• by AznHisoka on 4/10/14, 5:22 PM

  When I login to github, the repos I've "contributed" to (not even checkin code, but comment on) are on top, while my own are below the fold. What gives? I just wanna access my own repo.

• by pointpointclick on 4/10/14, 4:31 PM

  In the last paragraph OP writes "I implore you to allow us to sort our own repos. I know that there are mixed feelings about Windows 8's tile layout for their start menu, but I think that's the sort of thing that we need for project sorting."

  Just like they've been grouping projects on their explore pages -- https://github.com/explore -- I would love to see this functionality availble to users to sort repos on their own profile pages as well.

• by VaedaStrike on 4/10/14, 4:14 PM

  This thought literally just occurred to me yesterday when I was looking at the famo.us repo.

  what would be cool would be if each one could create their own views/rankings of anyone's public repo.

• by hardwaresofton on 4/10/14, 7:55 PM

  A note on the dot-files... would you consider putting your dot files/configration files in a project like mine:

  http://configr.io

  The project is pretty old, but I started it with the assumption that maybe dot files (that are OK being in the public domain) shouldn't be on github in the first place.

  I never did get github integration working, and the site is very basic, but I would love some opinions on it

• by bkurtz13 on 4/10/14, 4:46 PM

  With more and more companies using your GitHub page as a resume of sorts, this kind of customization is becoming a necessary requirement.

• by j2kun on 4/10/14, 5:42 PM

  Maybe my repos are a bit more popular (they're connected to a blog I write), but I've noticed that my best repos get pushed to the top by how often others star them.

  Still, couldn't you use the username.github.io to feature your repos? Or at least have a prominent link from a github profile to that page?

• by dfc on 4/10/14, 3:52 PM

  And please let me sort by mtime when viewing files/dirs in the "tree view mode."

• by kjjw on 4/10/14, 3:53 PM

  So desperately want a way to sort repos other than by most recent commit time. I think I'd give a toe for this.

  Needs to be a sort selected for others to view when they look at my or my organisations' repo list.

• by Dorian-Marie on 4/10/14, 4:15 PM

  Or you can also have a website where you do that

• by kurtfunai on 4/10/14, 4:38 PM

  I completely agree with this. It has bothered me for a long time that I cannot sort my own projects by what I think is important.

• by catshirt on 4/10/14, 7:12 PM

  if you only have 1 repository with more than 10 stars, sorting your work seems a like a premature optimization.

• by bmoresbest55 on 4/10/14, 4:06 PM

  Yes! GitHub, over here! We really want this! Please! ... And thank you!

• by pearjuice on 4/10/14, 4:37 PM

  Completely unrelated, but I couldn't stop laughing when I finished reading the article and saw "David Gay" as the post author at the bottom. Every time he introduces himself, reactions might range from hilarity to anger.

  Good for him to live with the pride of his ancestors and not changing his last name. Probably why the domain is oddshocks.com instead of his full name; I see it easily ending up on the wrong side of a NSFW-filter.