How you can create an awesome GitHub profile

Hello ! I’m Xavier Jouvenot and this is my fourth blog post on Hashnode, and also the latest for the Writeathon “4 Articles in 4 Weeks”! And since the topics is free, I will tell you how I ended up creating my personal custom GitHub profile.

Self promotion: Here are a few social networks where you can follow me and check my work as a programmer and a writer 😉

Personal blog, Twitter, GitHub

Create a custom profile

By default, every user has a GitHub profile with some elements displayed, like the popular repositories of the user and its personal contributions. But, as you may have seen on some other GitHub users, it is possible to customize your GitHub profile in order to add any information. So, now that I can officially be a Freelancer, I wanted to improve my online image/presence! And I found out that having a nice GitHub profile, describing who I am, what I did and what I can do, is a good way to achieve that goal 🙂

To create your own custom GitHub profile, all you need to do is to create a new repository named like your own GitHub username. When doing so, GitHub will warn you that you are creating a special repository. And once you will have validated your choice, you will face a fresh repository with a README file with the message Hi there 👋, message that is now displayed on your own personal profile, as you now have a custom personal profile up and ready.

The only thing you have to do now that your custom profile is set up, is to fill the README file with whatever you like to actually make it yours. In the rest of this article, we are going to focus on some elements that you can display in your profile to make it reflect information about you.

Technologies and tools

If you go on my profile, you will find a “Language and Tools” section, listing the one I am familiar with. It is not innovative in any way, as I have inspired myself from what other people have been doing on their own profile. But instead of making a long text detailing all the elements, I have opted to list them using the logo of each of those tools/languages. I found this way of displaying the information more visual as people in the industry will more easily point at the logo of the technologies they are also familiar with. 🙂

Let’s look at an example of what integrated one logo looks like in the Markdown file: