Sorry, I Don’t Have a GitHub Page

I think that I have probably been interviewed a lot. In the past 10 years I have probably been interviewed at least 100 times for positions that I have applied for. This does not count the number of phone interviews that I have had or any screening calls with an HR person, I mean I have put on a suit and met with a prospective employer at least 100 times.

Does this mean that I am bad at interviewing? Not necessarily. Interviewing is definitely a skill and I would like to think that I have gotten fairly good at it over the years. Interviews go both ways, and if I don’t think I would be a good fit for a company I won’t go forward with working for them. I also reject companies if I don’t think they have good values or I don’t believe in their visions. I have upset many employers and recruiters by declining further interviews and offers because I did not like the company I was interviewing with. I have also found that I no longer get nervous like I used to during interviews right when I graduated from College, which has definitely helped me as I have progressed in my career.

Why am I even talking about this? In case you have been living under a rock, this thing called DevOps and Automation is a pretty big deal nowadays. The line between Developers, Systems Administrators and Network Administrators is being increasingly blurred, so it is not uncommon to be asked to do code deployments and support when it sort of isn’t something you should be doing. The rise of AWS and Azure have definitely made this more common as well. I have been asked multiple times if I had a GitHub page to show a prospective employer what I have worked on and I always have to tell them no. This has had mixed results and I have had an interviewer lose interest in me the second they hear this.

So why don’t I have a GitHub page? Like everything in life, it is complicated. First of all I am not a programmer, so I don’t really need it. But wait, just because I am not a programmer doesn’t mean I don’t have a use for GitHub. I have used tools like GitHub for storing scripts and network configuration files that I have developed at my workplaces. The problem is, I typically don’t script for fun, I do it for all of the reasons that a good administrator uses scripting for, pure laziness. I find this handy chart useful for this:

Since I typically develop all of my scripts and network configurations while working for an employer or while I am on a contract, that means that all of the scripts that I develop are the property of that company. I also don’t really have a home lab anymore, so it’s not like I spend my evenings working on that for fun. I can’t just take a script that I wrote or modified at a former company and throw it onto the Internet for everyone to see. That is a pretty big issue and in this case I would be doing a few things wrong, including theft of company property and potentially exposing confidential information on the internal workings of a company.

So that is why I don’t have a GitHub page, and probably never will. Unless I get a lot more free time and start some unknown project, I don’t see that changing. But like everything in life, things change, so who knows. I believe very strongly in Open Source technologies, so anything I ever develop would be Open Source from day one.

I have been doing some work lately on a new project, and I may follow-up this post with the question, “Do you know what Network Automation is?”

September 30, 2022 Update: I now have a GitHub page.