Picture a hiring manager opening a new graduate’s GitHub profile. The six pinned items are a fork of CPython with no changes, a fork of a popular “awesome Python” list, cs101-exercises, hello-world, the team capstone, and bus-delays. Which one do you think they click first?
Probably the CPython fork, because it has the most famous name. But they find none of the candidate’s own work in it. The best work on the page sits in the last two slots, easy to miss.
Arrange the Shop Window
A reviewer who opens your profile looks at the top of the page, with your name and bio, the profile README, and the pinned items. This area is a shop window you arrange. Everything below it is an archive that reviewers rarely scroll through.
Here’s what you control. The interface changes now and then, so check each item against GitHub’s profile documentation as you go:
- Your name, bio, and links
- A profile README, which GitHub shows when you have a public repository with a name that exactly matches your username and a
README.mdat its root - Up to six pinned repositories or gists
- Each repository’s short description and topics
- Archiving a repository, which makes it read-only and marks it as archived, or making it private
Choose your pins from your proof map, starting with your lead projects, and make sure each one has a README that passes the thirty-second test from the previous lesson. You don’t have to fill all six slots. Three strong pins beat six mixed ones. Don’t pin forks without your own changes or course exercises. If you’ve had a pull request merged into someone else’s project, link to it from your profile README.
