There’s no better way to evaluate the quality of software than to inspect the actual software itself. With proprietary stuff this isn’t an option, but the beauty of open source is all the code is right there waiting for you to read it. 🙌
People often skip this (paramount) step because reading code can be difficult and time consuming. Here are a few questions you can ask yourself about a project, to get you started:
Does it have tests?
Can I run the test suite and they all pass?
Are the classes, functions, and variables named well?
Is there a logical flow of execution?
Would I design a solution similar to this?
Are there code comments? If so, are they useful?
The benefits of this process are immense:
You’ll learn a lot of tricks and techniques
You won’t be as intimidated to dive in and change or fix something if the need arise
You’ll be much more confident that the dependency you’re adding to your software is high quality
Especially since there was a bit about how recruiters look at stars. The vast majority of devs that have hobby githubs aren't going to be doing it for the stars!
I'd want to know if I'm hiring someone who writes good code when no one's watching rather than popular code with a lot of eyes on it.
Don’t forget to read the code! 💯
There’s no better way to evaluate the quality of software than to inspect the actual software itself. With proprietary stuff this isn’t an option, but the beauty of open source is all the code is right there waiting for you to read it. 🙌
People often skip this (paramount) step because reading code can be difficult and time consuming. Here are a few questions you can ask yourself about a project, to get you started:
The benefits of this process are immense:
As a wise Jedi once advised his Padewan:
Especially since there was a bit about how recruiters look at stars. The vast majority of devs that have hobby githubs aren't going to be doing it for the stars!
I'd want to know if I'm hiring someone who writes good code when no one's watching rather than popular code with a lot of eyes on it.
Most programmers don't have any (or any non-trivial) code in public, so it is a big bonus to see a programmer with a popular repository.
If nothing else, it's an indicator that the programmer...
Great point! I never even thought of actually looking at the code, lol.