The ****ing amazing way to improve your Github code
One of the best ways to impress a prospective finance employer is to strut your stuff in contributions to open source projects. Banks, hedge funds and more want to see your code in action; it's your best opportunity to impress.
The place to do that is Github. In a webinar from crypto trading and research company ProfitView, Jane Street quant Anthony Peacock said "if there's a Github link on someone's CV, I'll always look at that. ProfitView founder Richard Hickling said Github code is "real and you can show it to your prospective employers, they'll take it seriously."
If you want your code to stand out above the middle-grounders, you'll need to look at what elite coders are producing. While you might opt to look at just the starred repositories, there's a peculiar common thread among many elite pieces of code: swearing.
A university thesis published by Jan Strehmel at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology analyzed over 10,000 repositories of code, comparing examples that used any of over 300 swear words to starred repositories.
Using open source software benchmarker Softwipe to score each repository, the findings were quit illuminating.
Looking at these results, repositories that use swear words appears to have a higher concentration of code at the upper echelons of the softwipe scale.
That being said, the significantly high concentration at around the 7 point mark does appear to be an outlier, though concentrations above it appear to be higher than that of the starred repos.
The paper hypothesizes that swearing "constitutes an indicator of a profound emotional involvement of the programmer" which improves code through a more "thorough, critical, and dialectic code analysis process."
Does this mean you have to start throwing obscenities left right and centre in your code? Not necessarily. What you would be best served doing is eschewing inhibition in regards to your code and finding as much passion in the process as you can. You might look all the better for it.
Long story short... you have to give a s***.
Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: alex.mcmurray@efinancialcareers.com in the first instance.
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or libelous (in which case it won’t.)
