#masterbranch

Code and website in one repository: 2015 did not give us “Back to the Future” hoverboards, but it gave us the ability to put our websites next to our code on GitHub. However, doing it so is still easier said than done. In theory, this should be a one-click operation. But in practice, you need to be a little patient, understand a few git concepts and type in a small book on the command-line. And of course, you can skip all this and fork the template I created in this post which lives at gh-pages-orphan-branch-template

Creating a repo for your code

As of June 2015, you still cannot do this on the command line for GitHub. You can do it on the website or if you are over zealous, you can use the API with a RESTful client. For now, let’s say you like the simpler approach and do it on the website. First login to your account, and then click on this link and create your repository:

A few months ago Moisés heard about Masterbranch at a tech event and since then he has become one of our most active users. We asked him if he'd like to share his experience with other developers, and he accepted :)

By Moisés Maciá, Senior Developer at  ideup!

Hi all, I am Moisés and I am a Senior Developer currently working for ideup! in Madrid. I like PHP, Symfony2, MySQL, RabbitMQ, amongst others, and also Internet applications.

I really love the idea of Masterbranch, and I am here to share my experience. 

It solves a problem for lots of us

Masterbranch solves a common problem that we, software developes, have: your printed resume- or even your LinkedIn profile- does not reflect your real programming skills. Why not? Because putting together *all* your experience in just a couple of pages it’s kind of imposible (and a pain in the ass).

With Masterbranch I can avoid having my identity spread over many places, plus others can see my experience, skills and technologies at first glance. In addition, it’s very easy to set up a profile: all you need to do is connecting your repositories- git in my case-, and Masterbranch does the dirty work for you syncing and merging it all under one account.

We have fun at work

In my company we all have accounts in Masterbranch and, since our private repos are automatically synced to Masterbranch, we got DevScore points every time we make new commits.

Also, every week, with every sprint, we have a real battle to see who wins the MVP- Most Valuable Programmer- and whose DevScore is higher. It’s really fun. It’s like an extra reward for your work.

I can make that companies see a complete profile of me

Without a tool like Masterbranch a recruiter can find my LinkedIn, read my resume ore even see my Github or Bitbucket accounts with some of my projects. But this is only a small fraction of my actual work as a developer.

With Masterbranch I can also integrate with other dev sites- like StackOverflow- and, most important of all, I can add my experience in private projects, which is my day-to-day work. This way my profile becomes much more appealing to companies because it’s also more complete. 

Our friends and researchers from the Leibniz Universität Hannover in Germany and the University of Victoria in Canada are investigating how different websites add a reputation layer on top of existing code sharing sites. We are trying to help them out and they need your collaboration too. 

Keep reading for a Beta Invite below!

Hello!

We’re a team of software engineering researchers from the Leibniz Universität Hannover in Germany and the University of Victoria in Canada. We’re investigating how developers use sites like Masterbranch that add a reputation layer on top of existing code sharing sites. This survey is part of these efforts.

The best part? We’ll publish our results so you can better understand what your peers want to get out of the site! Plus: Masterbranch will be able to improve the site based on your feedback! Please note that the survey asks for your Masterbranch account. Knowledge of this might also tell us your Github account. However, we respect your privacy and all data that we publish will be anonymized. The survey will take about 10-15 minutes to complete. All answers are optional. Thanks for helping us out!

- Leif, Fernando, Brendan, Christoph, Peggy, Kurt

GO TO THE SURVEY

This has been a great year for us at Masterbranch. We started the year moving to a new city, Barcelona, which brought us very good advise from friends and investors. In July we moved again, this time to San Francisco, and it meant a whole world of new things and deep learning, both in vital and professional aspects of our lives.

In December 2011, the Masterbranch community is five times bigger than at the beginning of the year, which is awesome, guys! We are in love with this community and with what we do, and we are really thankful for having such a big community supporting Masterbranch.

Also, this has been the year in which the first companies have started to hire software engineers through Masterbranch... all around the world! Geneva, Barcelona, Madrid, San Francisco or New York are some of the cities where companies have found their new CTO's and tech members for their bad ass companies.

And because mantaining complete and always up-to-date professional profiles is our main concern, this year we have been working hard on hooks and connectors to support almost any open source project and, for the first time, private repos too. This has turned into consolidating the largest database of open source projects in the world, with 694,299 projects right now.

Another popular new feature that we have introduced this year is the DevScore, a score that not only takes into account your activity as a programmer but also your project mates and colleagues reputation/ activity.

And last but not least this year, and with the support of Atlassian, Heroku, Klout, Jetbrains, Tinypay.me, NitroPDF, 3Scale, Mashape and NextSpace, we have organized our first hackathon which will be the first of many more!

Here's some data and curious facts that we want to share with you all:

Which navigators do Masterbranch users use the most

Chrome 39,54%

Firefox 38,3%

IE 10,15%

Safari 7,95%

Opera 2,32%

2,95% of mobile usage of the website

iPad 20,3%

iPhone 15,6%

HTC Desire 1,81%

Samsung Galaxy S 1,59%

iPod Touch 1,54%

Google Nexus One 1,45%

Where are the most active users located

United States 22%

Spain 6,66%

Germany 6,18%

France 4,99%

India 4,58%

United Kingdom 4,5%

China 3,42%

Canada 3,01%

Russia 2,92%

Most used programming languages (Dec. 2011)

Java 45,5%

PHP 9,8%

C# 8,3%

XML 8,2%

C 4,6%

JavaScript 4,2%

Ruby 3,7%

HTML 3,4%

C++ 2%

Python 1,9%

Most active users (Dec. 2011)

Guy Chauliac (Belgium)

Marc Alcaraz (France)

Mark Sobkow (Canada)

Olivier Lamy (France)

Victor Z (Canada)

Ricard Forniol (Spain)

Erik Michaels-Ober (United States)

Francis Tyers (Spain)

Nick Black (United States)

Since some days ago you can add your StackOverflow reputation to your profile on Masterbranch.com

Our mission in Masterbranch is to bring you the best profiles for developers based on you proven information. First was Open Source analysis, then we released the support to add your private code from GitHub and now is your StackOverflow reputation.

By now the integration with StackOverflow is just the reputation in your profile but we are open to integrate more information from there. What do you want to see in your profile? We would love if you leave your ideas on our uservoice.

We are working really hard on aggregating, analyzing and putting together all your information not just code. And also, as you can see in the screenshot, now there a DevScore, we will release more information about the DevScore soon.

We are involved in this adventure since a year ago, well pure Masterbranch Idea born around june 2009,  in august a first version was online, but really different to what Masterbranch is today.

As the project keeps evolving our minds are blowing up, we work a lot of hours at day and we love it because Masterbranch is like our kid, but we need to laugh everyday. Laughing, making bad jokes is the assurance of our wellness probably not for our mental health :D

In this post #0  I Just want to say what are we going to use this blog for. This will be like   a personal blog but for the team. We do not like blogs of companies which just talk about their products or about how awesome they are. We'll post anything, travels, technical articles, interesting things, photos, whatever, and maybe sometimes something about our product, our kid.

Cheers.