Making your GitHub profile more awesome!
You probably use a code sharing site like GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket to showcase your l33t coding skills, and act as a portfolio of the sort of things you work on, but it's probably looking a bit text-heavy?
We're here to help you change that! With Holopin, you can embed a live copy of your badge board so all your badges get automatically added to your profile.
For this guide, we're going to work with GitHub. But these steps should work for any site that allows you to use a Markdown formatted file as your profile!
Markdown + Holopin = 💖
Markdown is a markup language that lets you write documents with rich formatting like headings,
bullet lists, tables, bold, underline and italic text but in a way that's easy to type (no angle brackets and keywords like in HTML), fits in a completely plain text file and still looks readable even as plain text. For example, you can do things like this:
# This is a heading
This is some **bold** text, and some _italics_, and this is **really** important. Markdown is
1. Easy to type
2. Plain text
3. Readable
(this whole blog post was written in Markdown!)
Step 1: Create a personal README on GitHub
Jump onto your GitHub account, and hop to your profile. If you've not got a personal README, you'll need to create one. Use the + symbol and choose New repository:
Once you're there, set the repository name to be your username and you'll see a message to show you're creating a "special" repo:
Now initialise that with a README.md:
Once your repo is ready, you can hit the button to open an editor in browser:
This is the place where you can write a bit about yourself, and add some links to your social media.
Step 2: Customize your Holopin board 🪄
If you haven't already, you'll need to create a Holopin account. Hop over to holopin.io to get started (I hear there's early bird badges available if you're quick too 👀).
Once you've got your Holopin account, head to your profile and add your badges from the inventory:
Got it looking nice? Great. You may have spotted there's a bit of code under your board... this is the magic to get things showing on sites other than Holopin.
Step 3: Add your Holopin board to your GitHub profile
This is where the Markdown comes into action. That link looks like this, and you can find it at the bottom of your board:
[](https://holopin.io/@rphi)
But what does it mean? We've got two things going on here, first we're including the image with ![](), and then we're linking that image to your Holopin profile with [](). This is the same as if you were linking to an image on the web, but we're using the Holopin API to generate the image on the fly.
Paste in your Holopin embed, hit commit, and if all has gone to plan, your board will now be in pride of place on your GitHub profile page!
Whenever you edit your board on the Holopin site, your GitHub profile will update automatically.
We'd love to see how you've incorporated your Holopin badges on your GitHub profile! Tag @holopin_ on Twitter and we'll retweet it with the community... and maybe even send you a badge or two!
Top comments (21)
So far I have 3 badges! Can't wait for Holopin to become more popular! Hoping that after Hacktoberfest that more companies will provide integrations. Would be super cool if the @thepracticaldev synced all its badges with Holopin.
+1 for this @thepracticaldev
👀 @thepracticaldev
This is what sells the product. Hallelujah 🙏
This is a cool tutorial, but I see one fundamental problem: I can't participate. I tried, but there's no options available to me to add badges in the service.
I assume this means you just got this idea off the ground, which is awesome! But I would suggest a little more investment into usability, it'll enable people like myself to participate more easily :)
Okay, I have 1 badge after manually engaging with your signup workflow, so there's at least something.
This is a cool idea, but as far as adding this to my github, I would like to be able to showcase skills before I were to add it to mine. Any idea on when we might expect badges like that?
Hi Joe - great to hear the love for the platform! Holopin badges are credentials so they need to be issued to you by a partner organization. Hop on over to @hacktoberfestteam and register for this year's Hacktoberfest for another badge, and we're working to bring more issuing organizations onboard over the coming weeks so your badges have some friends! If you have any projects you'd like to see issuing badges, please tag them in this thread to spread the word 😁 (...some may also say there's another Pegasaurus about if you DM us your Holopin username 🦖 👀)
Can we use special hacker text in our profile?
Nice post, Rob - thanks for sharing. I think this is a really clear explanation of how to add these new badges to pages like a GitHub profile. I'm excited to start earning some :-)
OK, I couldn't resist... here's my newly-shiny profile!
Looking good 😁 - and good luck with Hacktoberfest!
Great post! Saving this for later.
That was helpful! :)
How to get all the badges?
x2
I also added Holopin to my github home!! 🎉
PS: Thanks for the support on twitter to issue my hackotberfest badge 🙇🏽♂️
Github profile
Juan Vega (He/Him)
I am a product-focused Software Engineer that believes that a key element for a software product to success is technical excellence that among other things, it includes: pragmatism, good communication skills, deep understanding of business problems, and well-sized solution.
Read more...
I am not a major contributor, but I always try to put my two cents on projects that I like. Remember to check my code contribution on github. For my last projects I have been using gitlab, so check also jdvr on gitlab
Aside from existing repositories here, I have submitted more than 40+ well-known code exercises solution to excercism.io, if you are considering me as a candidate it might worth the time to look at my public exercism profile.
it's looking nice ^^
is it just me or my board has no badges?