first of all, an excellent GitHub account can certainly add a lot of color to you.
My personal experience is that I often get emails saying that I was seen on GitHub, and I hope I can go for an interview or something. Or a classmate's classmate saw my GitHub and said, "Wow, this girl has more fans than me, I'm going to chat up ~" or something like that.
(Note: I don't have a lot of GitHub powder, and it's less than 3. There are only 22 star projects at most, which is not good compared with the big V's, but it can also be seen. )
But can these follower and star show that this person or this project is very powerful?
not really.
Just like any social networking site, building a blank repo with GitHub V can get a lot of praise.
then someone wants to say, that is, the big V is very powerful. From this point of view, doesn't it mean that it is directly proportional to the ability?
no, because there are many GitHub follower and star, it can be achieved not only by writing high-quality open source code frequently.
For example, a newcomer to GitHub has released an awesome project. If he doesn't make any promotion, it is likely that this project will only be praised by a few sporadic people when others search for keywords several years later.
some people may believe that the fragrance of wine is not afraid of the depth of the alley, but in the era of excessive information, what is the probability that your fragrance will float out of this alley?
Let's take my own experience as an example. Before I wandered around Zhihu, there were only a hundred GitHub fans. I did a "change my mind" project (Ovilia/Biangua Github)
and I showed it to my friends through social networking sites such as Weibo Douban. There has never been a
star, and it only spread to 3 or 4 people. Until the Zhihu rose a little bit, suddenly many people visited this project, and of course, star rose slowly (although there are only nine now! I also want to be bigger
V. At this time, it would be super convincing to say "there are 9k star now"! )
The conclusion is that even if your project is awesome (at least interesting), it is difficult to get a great response on GitHub without other channels of publicity. Therefore, there are many follower and star in GitHub, which are largely mixed with various promotion factors. It is unfair to directly measure the level of programmers.
Then the problem comes again. Before V became big, social networks didn't have many fans. How can we effectively promote GitHub? This seems to be a question of which comes first, the egg or the chicken.
Fortunately, this problem is relatively easy to solve, that is, promoting your works in various discussion groups and other places. If the project is not only understandable by China people (for example, my "change of mind" is difficult to explain to foreigners), try to post it in English to many forums used by foreigners, such as G+ Community and Reddit. Although Reddit will bring much more visitors than G+, I always think that people there are sharp, so I will only post Reddit when the works are really excellent.
digression ... back to the topic, another reason why GitHub should not be used as a measure of programmers' level is that GitHub is a voluntary contribution to the open source community after all, so we should not "kidnap" everyone to make efforts to contribute code on GitHub. Otherwise, this may be a disguised form of discrimination. See this interesting article: The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community
At this point, all three questions of the subject can be answered. Although GitHub is very important (just like a face is very important to the world of looking at faces), a beautiful face is a stepping stone at most, and its importance cannot be overemphasized. After all, others can be excellent in places you can't see.