Career Support

Career Support #

The following is a summary of the collaborative discussion about “Uses of Github to support your career”, that took place during the SORTEE Hackathon. Go to this hackmd document for original notes from participants.

Participants of this topic:

Irene Godoy

Dylan Gomes

Layla Michán

Luna L. Sánchez Reyes

1. Presentation of the breakout room topic #

Examples of career supporting resources:

  • Personal and Academic websites
  • Project websites
  • CVs
  • Presentations, slides & talks
  • Tutorial & Workshop websites
  • Course websites
  • Using GitHub projects to manage your work

How do we use GitHub to support our careers?

  • Actually create a website by using GitHub pages https://pages.github.com/

    • This can allow us to showcase our coding skills by including code snippets, interactive plots, etc. directly on our websites.

  • Store resources

    • Easily find our own data and code on multiple machines and have backups.

  • Hosting and deploying the resources itself

  • Share resources

  • Collaborate & Network

2. Exposition of examples and individual/collective practices #

  • Personal or Academic Websites:

Examples:

Non-GitHub example:

GitHub repo: https://github.com/LunaSare/blogdown_lunasare

  • Project websites:

Example: https://randyposada4.github.io/bats/

GitHub repo: https://github.com/Randyposada4/bats

  • CVs:

Example: https://docs.google.com/loreabad6/R-CV/master/CV.pdf

GitHub repo: https://github.com/loreabad6/R-CV

  • Presentations, Slides & Talks:

Example: https://lunasare.github.io/slides/

GitHub repo: https://github.com/LunaSare/slides

  • Tutorials & Workshops

Example: https://lunasare.github.io/ssb2020_workshop/03-broken-taxa/index.html

GitHub repo: https://github.com/LunaSare/ssb2020_workshop

Example: https://opentreeoflife.github.io/SSBworkshop/

GitHub repo: https://github.com/OpenTreeOfLife/opentreeoflife.github.io/blob/master/SSBworkshop.md

Layla’s:

https://sites.google.com/a/ciencias.unam.mx/layla-michan/cursos/pcm

Irene’s:

https://sites.google.com/view/irene-godoy/curriculum-vitae

3. Discussion and summary of challenges #

Consider the following discussion questions:

  1. What other tools have you used for this purpose?

    • Websites: Wix squarespace, Google Sites
    • CVs: google sites has templates, is a bit interactive, you can insert airtable data.
    • CVs: Air table database management software. Is very friendly, no coding knowledge needed at all, it hs many templates, it will give you free hosting if it is a project important for the community. VS GitHub is free no matter what. You can also use airtable for free but with limited options (not full functionality)
    • CVs: word is just the worse lol, it is not free, formatting is a mess.

  2. How does GitHub compare to other tools you’ve used for this purpose?

    • Wix sites are more difficult to make look professional and difficult to embed plots, code, etc. (especially dynamic)
    • The amount of templates available on GitHub might be potentially infinite: you can fork public repositories from any other user to use as templates

  3. What are the main challenges in using GitHub for this purpose?

    • Do we need to know how to code to use GitHub to create resources?
    • Understanding where to get started in creating a website
      • Dylan: is not straightforward where to begin (even with lots of GitHub/RStudio/Rmd experience).
      • Irene: as a proficient R user, it should not take a long time for her to make her own website, if she forks it from a template
      • Layla: in her experience, it was hard to make her website using github pages. It took her a long time.
    • Use of git from terminal vs. from rstudio or GitHub desktop: terminal seems to be more efficient but it seems daunting at the beginning “I am a real hacker now!”

  4. What are the main benefits of using GitHub over some other tool?

    • It is easily editable once it is set up (code tweaks), which make reproducing pages, etc. easier.

  5. What could be done to improve GitHub for this purpose?

    • Easier explanations, using non-technical language, are there any demos available?
    • the learning curve is too steep
    • it is inviting to work with it but it is still very scary to use it. It is not related to generation but more related to how much you are familiar with coding, designed for people that is used to the terminal and not a graphical user interface. Even if the graphical user interface is really friendly, usage is still not. Layla had to follow a tutorial to create her webpage. My college student took 3 to 6 months to not be too scared to change anything on his repo!

4. Return of participants and organizers to the main workshop room #

Summary: The participants decided to make an infography of this breakout room subject, in english and spanish. Github is not the most intuitive without coding knowledge. There must be a way to make it simpler for new users, to expand the community.

Participants are also interested in using GitHub for:

Sharing data Hosting resources