If you are a GitHub user, I have a challenge for you. How confident are you that you know every single secret feature within GitHub? If you want to test your metal and see how well you know GitHub then this article is for you. The best news is that if you fail to pass this quiz, the booby prize is learning something new. So if your up for the challenge, read on 🔥🔥🔥

How To Make On Money On GitHub

The first test is not really a hidden feature, however, as these tips can potentially help you to make money, its a good palce to start. Do you know the two best ways to make money using GitHub? While it is possible to make money, I won't lie and say its super-easy, however, there are two possible avenues that you should know about.

Sponsorship: The first way to get money from your code in GitHub is to find sponsors. GitHub Sponsors offers businesses an opportunity to support open source developers directly, fostering goodwill and collaboration within the developer community. If you have a project that is well regarded and used by the community, you can enable the sponsorship link on your GitHub repo to try and entice a sponsor. To do this, there are a few steps:

  1. Apply for your account to allow sponsorship from this link
  2. Create a strip account to take payments
  3. Await an approval
  4. Add a new file to your repo FUNDING.yml within your .github folder. You can find out what you exactly need to add to this file from the official GitHub docs page here.

Bounties: The next test, did you know people and companies offer monetary offers to the community in order for them to get certain bugs and issues fixed? A second way that you can make some extra money coding is to find and fix these bounties.

Now I'm not saying that finding a bounty and fixing that bug before anyone else will be more profitable than saying finding a freelance gig, however, for some it this will be a good side hustle. If this sounds interesting, your next question will likely be, how can I find these bounties? Well here are three resources to help you:

Make Your Profile Pop

The next tip can potentially help improve your odds of landing jobs that you apply for. This tip will only take you a maximum of 30 minutes to implement, however, a lot of developers still don't do it.

When you apply for a new job, it is likely your future employer will look at your GitHub. Obviously, having some code and repos in your profile will be important, however, don't just leave it to your potential new employer to find what you deem to be important.

In GitHub its very easy to create a homepage on your profile. Using markdown you can write a bio, give quick links the code you want people to find and basically sell yourself. Simply creating a good looking homepage can make you standout in a job hunt so there is no excuse for not doing it!

Creating a homepage is simple, create a public repo in your account where the name of the repo matches your GitHub account name. Within this repo, add a README.md and within this file, add your profile text.

If you have no idea what to add here, the good news is that there are free tools that can generate most of it for you. If you want to learn more about these tools, I created this blog and video I created called Improve Your GitHub Profile In 5 Minutes to learn more!

Keyboard Shortcuts

Did you know GitHub online has a bunch of keyboard shortcuts you can add within your browser? To learn what there are just type ? on GitHub and this will bring up a dialog box that lists the keyboard shortcuts available for that page.

  • T: Perform a local repo search
  • S or /: Search for code on GitHub
  • E: Edit the current file without clicking the edit button
  • G + P: go to Pull requests
  • J and K allows you to navigate up and down the page.

A full list is also available here

Search

Do you ever waste time trying to find code that you wrote ages ago but you now can't find? If so learning how to make better use of GitHub search will help to make you more productive. You can learn what search commands you can use on a page by typing ?, however, here are some usefulness to be aware of. The first thing to make you more productive is finding the code you cant find. To help you on this quest, you want to use the filter. First, filter out the results to only your code or your companies using user or org

If you know when you roughly created the code you want to find then also apply the date filter. You can filter by the year or the exact date using all the normal operators:

Finally, if you know the language you used to write the code, you can further filter the results from all the other noise by using the language filter:

Adding these three things to your search is simple, but, will make it much easier for you to find the code you are looking for!

Simply adding these three filters will make it much easier to find your own code, however, what about when you need to find other peoples code? When you need to search for other code, one useful tip is to filter the results to repos that have been starred over a certain limit using stars:

You can also filter by the license type using license, e.g. you want to find code you can borrow without license issues!

You can learn more about this topic here and this blog.

Online IDE

We all know and love the classic GitHub viewer, however, this isn't the only way to view your repo online. Did you know if you go to any repo and add 1s into the Git URL to that repo, you can view your code in a code editor. Instead of using this URL:

You can change it like this:

It is worth noting that this extension is not an official GitHub thang, however, if you prefer a more official GitHub editor then instead of changing the URL, simply press . within your repo and this will open that code inside of VS-Code online for you to use! Its now up to you to pick the editor that makes you the most happiest!

Contribute

The last tip is a simple one, however, it is the most impactful one in terms of the possie vibes you can give to the world. If you want to get into open source and put your coding skills to good use, but you are not sure where to start, then simply visit your favourite open source project, or, go to a tool you are interesting in learning. At the end of the repo homepage URL add /contribute to the URL.

If contribution is enabled, you will see a list of all the open issues, pick one and try to fix it. Rinse and repeat and before long you will become an open-source legend!

Happy Coding 🤘