I’m going to do more of the Show Your Work thing here on my blog. Buckle up.

A README for You, Automated

I really like automation. Probably a little too much. Add my love of README files, and you’ll be able to see where this is going.

One of the things I wanted to do since it came out in July 2020(!), was have my own personal README on GitHub. It’s this feature on GitHub that allows folks to customize their profile page.

So for example, my GitHub username is program247365, if you create a README.md it will render this at the top of your profile page, in my case at https://github.com/program247365.

Folks have been really creative with this since it came out. Right away Simon Willison talked about having a self-updating README. And of course I said to myself, “I must have this.”

The neat part is that I don’t have to “update the data” myself manually, it uses a GitHub Action to update it every six hours. I had some time, alongside my friend Claude to put together a first version.

I cobbled together a bunch of different interesting widgets, like getting GitHub stats from GitHub’s API. I don’t necessarily like everything on the README right now, but it looks pretty good for a shitty first draft ;).

Further Inspiration

There are some really cool ones:

• https://github.com/topics/profile-readme - see a big list at this topic profile-readme

• https://zzetao.github.io/awesome-github-profile/ - gallery of github profiles