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Alexandru Ardelean
Alexandru Ardelean

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Learning to promote oneself

You know when you get to learn new things and sometimes you learn them from interns?

I mentored a few interns during my career (since ~2007) and most of them were pretty standard-scared-little interns.
I don't mean this in a bad way, or to demean anyone; as an intern is how I started, and looking back.... I am now wondering how I was as an intern ¯_(ツ)_/¯ [1]

Anyway, there was this one guy who taught me a few tricks, and looking back he is [at this point in time] the best intern I've had.
Sure, he was hasty [as some interns are], tried to finish things really fast, only to see it fail in a CI build. But I know that I was about the same in this respect.

So, what I learned from him are [in a random order]:

  1. thegit worktree command; this will save you gigabytes of storage if you need to work the Linux kernel; I mean just the .git is ~5 GBs and just grows when adding remotes [2]
  2. he tried to convince me to use tmux... maybe the next intern/person will actually succeed to convince me; there's various overlap between tmux, zsh and maybe something else, and I just didn't bother after a while
  3. better promoting my CV/myself

Ok, so point 3 is what this article is about, because I never really gave this much importance.

So, on this, what I learned from the guy is:

  1. Create a https://github/<user>/aboutme repo and upload your resume (in doc and pdf formats) there
  2. Create a gist with your resume in PDF format and JPEG/GIF as the first file in that gist (you'll see why)
  3. Pin the repos you're most proud of on your https://github/<user> profile page. Make sure to also pin your gist.
  4. Optionally, a markdown can be added to the gist and the aboutme repo. I didn't yet, I might later.

An example of how it looks on my page now is:

Screenshot_2020-11-25_11-04-53

Essentially what happens is that the image from the gist (when pinned) screams pretty loud on your profile page, which may be something that someone would want. I don't know... what do I know? :p ¯_(ツ)_/¯

You can also fork these gists, I also forked this one from someone else's and modified it.

Turns out gists are git repos as well. You can clone, modify and push back to Github. Who knew?


[1] Ya' know... that is actually that I will have to reflect upon for the next few hours.
[2]

linux # ➦ eccc87672492 # du -sh .git
5,7G    .git
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