Updating my GitHub Readme!

Kyle Willard
3 min readNov 17, 2021

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Original GitHub Readme

After a short vacation of sorts to go see family I wanted to dive back into the job search and one of the ways that I wanted to do that was to streamline, and tune my visibility to potential employers, and recruiters. The first spot that came to mind outside of my portfolio, that will take substantially more effort and time, was to go after my GitHub profile.

As you can see by the image above it was pretty bland just showing a ton of text, and not really showing anything exciting, and engaging, which we all know are pain points for most people at this point, so I set out to add some flair and make it a bit more engaging, and informative, but also to keep it professional, while being something that can be consumed rapidly within a few seconds to speed things up for recruiters that are already crunched on time because of their insane workloads. Seems like the right direction to go right?

The After Picture of my GitHub Readme

There were a ton of options for updating and fixing what I felt were issues with my readme. This fixed the vast majority of them.

I want to make sure that I am very clear, I used a generator for this instead of hand coding it. I did this because well, to be quite honest, time is money. I would rather invest into talking about it here, and showing you a rad tool that I was able to use because someone got creative, figured out a gap, and leveraged that gap into a great worthwhile tool, which is the basis for software engineers to really build amazing things.

The tool is this:

Now before I wrap this up let’s talk about the what and the why:

Why did I do this?
I stated it a bit above, but let’s dive into it. Standing out is important, but you have to do so in a reasonable, and positive manner. This gave me the ability to do that in a clean fashion.
Additionally it is beyond important that recruiters, and hiring managers can quickly snag the information that they are looking for without spending a month reading your information. This does that exceedingly well.
Lastly, it’s like putting on a suit… you just feel good about yourself (unless it is blue, and you are a big guy…hint hint…)

What will it (hopefully) accomplish?
My hope is that this will be more useful for hiring managers, and by extension boost my ability to get a job as I keep grinding down the path of diving into the industry. It will make things a bit more streamlined for technically anyone to read it, but that is the main goal.

In closing, this is a short article, but jetlag is not my friend for the past week, so take a look at the link above, check out my GitHub and my LinkedIn if you would like. I think both do a pretty good job for what they are intended for.
Feel free to reach out if you have questions!

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