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Discussion on: The Best Thing for Your Resume

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abhinav1217 profile image
Abhinav Kulshreshtha • Edited

I can say the bad thing about my resume. Mentioning open source contribution without checking it's existence. Last week, I applied for a job, Proudly mentioning 2 of open source projects on which I used to be primary maintainer up until about last 18 months.

One of which was fedy(fedora utils). I was maintainer from 2013-2018 after satya handed the project to me and 2 other guys. A new guy came in 2017 and started talking on workflow and other technical buzz word like docker, CI, automation. He Changed the policy of org that only he can merge on master, saying we are not working professionally enough. He removed the repo which we used for deployment citing all will be handled with travis and automatically. Then he got busy, Stopped replying on telegram, didn't gave us our own access back. Everytime we tried, he would just say make time in weekend to setup automation.

So what happened was that we couldn't do any release after fedora 27, We moved on to other projects, and since I used to directly work on that repo, I didn't have any copy on my own profile with my own contributions. So when employers last week went to github, They couldn't find the repo, They managed to find few repos, but none of them had any of my history. And since that new guy had deleted the org, Github now does not show any contribution I had between those years.

I didn't get job, But more importantly, I lost a good reputation. One of the interviewer actually asked me why I faked my contributions, when I have so much to show for. I tried to explain but alas.....

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dbanty profile image
Dylan Anthony

Iā€™m sorry you had such a crumby experience. Hopefully someone else can benefit from your story. Maybe the advice is if you want to call out specific contributions on a resume to keep a fork of the project in your own GitHub account. This could make it easier for people to find your work too.

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abhinav1217 profile image
Abhinav Kulshreshtha

Yes, Everything is an education. I didn't knew that github would delete all the data from individuals too. My graph of year 2014-15 is completely white and nothing to prove otherwise. I contacted Rohit, but even his repo don't have any of my contributions. He was aware that org has been deleted because he lost a lot of personal scripts too. And that new guy is inactive on github now. Fedy was very popular application on fedora. We were very proud to be connected with it.

I am not currently contributing to anything big, But from now on I will always maintain my separate fork, and be more proactive on displaying credit of my work.