We develop several projects every year, push them to GitHub, and forget about them. We don't have much time to maintain our old projects; hence, it's out of the question to update them with new features. However, many times once we are done with the project, we don't even take some time and write a good description of the project in the README.md informing the visitor about the project, its features, and how to install it locally. While this may not be a big deal, but in case you have a good description and some potential recruiter is visiting your profile, this leaves a very good impression of yours.
Nonetheless, it's hard to create some content about the project every time we have a new project. This is the time when procrastination wins ultimately leading to not caring much about the description of the project.
However, I recently discovered a good solution for beating this procrastination. GitHub provides this feature where you can create a template repository, where you can add a README.md file and later use this template for every new project repository. In the template repo, you can create a README.md file having the following content,
# Project Title
## Description
## Tech Stack
## How it looks
## Features
## How to run the project
Subsequently, when you create a new GitHub repo, you can inherit this template and immediately fill the information in this README.md file. Well when we start the project, we have enough energy and potential to write as much content as we want about the project.
With every milestone achieved, you could update this README.md file as required. Since you already have a starting point, you would tend to procrastinate less as compared to when you have to write everything from scratch. Besides using this functionality also makes sure that all your project repositories have a uniform description making it easy for the visitors to scan through your multiple projects. To add to that, apart from having a README.md file in your template, you could also have any other required file that you feel you use in most of your projects such as files for GitHub Actions, .gitignore, etc. This would also eliminate the extra effort you take every time while start a new project.
Following are the steps of how to create a template:
Step 1: Create a new repository (the same way you do for your projects) and name it whatever you want.
Step 2: Add all the necessary files which you expect to be in all your projects.
Step 3: Go to settings. In the General tab, under the Repository name, click the "Template repository" checkbox and you're done. Now this repository serves as your template repository.
Following are the steps to inherit this template in your new repository:
Step 1: While creating a new repository, above the text field where you write the repository name, there is a dropdown named 'Repository template'. Your template repository will be an option in this dropdown. Choose it and continue to create the repository.
Now every time, you create a new repository for the project, you will just have the fill information under all your headings in the README.md file and you will be good to go. With this minimal effort, you can make a good impression on the visitors to your GitHub.
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