Lots of people in the open source community say they strongly consider a candidate's Github profile when hiring.

I'm active on Github, with a few projects of my own and some contributions to others. But looking at my own profile as if I were an employer, I see a lot of noise: projects I cloned but never contributed to, etc. The projects and patches I'm proud of don't stand out.

If you assess people's Github profiles, how do you do it? And as a developer, should I do anything differently - for example, delete cloned repos I'm not actively working on?

I've used GitHub profiles, twitter streams, and blogs all as indicators of quality in programming interviews/candidate screening. They all generate different signals in their own way.

9 out of 10 applicants have never submitted a single patch to a single open source project.  Even updating broken documentation puts you into an upper echelon of developer. It shows that you are familiar enough with some open source package to know what's wrong, you care enough to submit a patch, and the maintainers of that package think your work is good enough to be included.  As a generalization, it shows that you take the initiative to leave dirty things better than you found them.

It sounds really simple, but again 9 out of 10 developers never bother to take this all important step.

So a single accepted patch looks great. A long history of 2-3 simple patches per quarter is even better. Even better than that would be to contribute something of note.


Substantial contributions to important Open Source projects(upper 0.1%-1% of candidates) 
Extended history of small contributions to any projects (upper 5% of candidates)
A single one-liner patch to a relatively unknown package (upper 10% of candidates)


On the same note, developers that tweet about drinking and going to see movies all the time tend to make mediocre hires. A tweet stream where every 3rd message is about technology points towards the kind of rabid junkyard dog developer that cares about his craft and relentlessly pursues solutions.

Blogging is also a great indicator of quality, but for communication style rather than technical prowess. How many programmers bother to write blog article #1? The same kind of 1%/5%/10% cutoffs apply here.
