How To Create A GitHub Profile README
So today I got up and on going over my google news and updates I stumbled upon an article that totally fascinated me.
I am in a point in my software development journey where I realized that marketing yourself is just as important as having the right skills, because no matter how much skills you have, if you are interested in making money out of your craft, you need to make sure you can carefully and enticingly communicate your abilities such that anyone who sees it, wants a bit of you.
Let’s checkout the article: How To Create A GitHub Profile README by Monica Powell. It came at almost the right time; I did not have any portfolio website of my own and was still in the process of designing one, so I took this article as a great place to get started creating and crafting my public online portfolio. In the article, Monica provided a walk-through of how to create a profile-level README to display prominently on her GitHub profile, we will be following along and see where it leads us at the end :-).
Lets get started, but before we do, please do checkout Monica’s article for details on this new GitHub feature.
Creating a profile README
Create a repository that is the same name as your username. In my case, kefeh.
1. Create a new repository with the same name (including casing) as your GitHub username: https://github.com/new
2. Create a README.md file inside the new repo with content (text, GIFs, images, emojis, etc.)
3. Commit your fancy new README!
4. If you’re on GitHub’s web interface you can choose to commit directly to the repo’s main branch (i.e., master or main) which will make it immediately visible on your profile)
5. Push changes to GitHub (if you made changes locally i.e., on your computer and not github.com)
So before I continued, I realized I needed to change my profile picture and also create a banner for myself, so I hopped to my gallery, picked a picture, and for the banner, I use Canva.com (a free online design resource that is just amazing, you should probably check it out). I also used this amazing free tool SQUOOSH to compress my image since the image was greater than 1MB which was GitHub’s limit, and it gave me outstanding results, with 85% compression.
I went over some inspirations from the article and “this gify one” got my attention, so I went on a quest to find the right gif, and viola, I got one :-) “the sharingan” (checkout giphy).
Here is the final thing.
Note: I placed my banner image in a folder (in the same repo) called assets and used its url to add to my README
If you like this, go ahead and create yours and give me @KefehCollins (and @jlengstorf @waterproofheart #perfectreadme) a shout-out on twitter with the image to your own README.
Happy Hacking :-)
