Make the repository public - no-one cares about your code

Just make the repository public (assuming it contains no Publicly Identifiable Information or embedded secrets.)
If it does, you should remove them anyway.

There are common fears about making code public.

• What if someone takes it and makes something with it that they start selling or otherwise competing with my project?
• What if someone laughs at it?
• What if someone copies something?

So what? No-one is paying attention to what you put on-line. (If they were I doubt you'd have nothing better to do than read my blog.)

• Use an appropriate license to address possible competition concerns.
• Ignore the haters.
• Assume that something will be copied.

I've heard it said many times (sorry, I can't attribute the original source) that "any code on the internet will eventually end up in production."

And if it does, that's ok. I don't feel responsible for someone else's codebase if they copy something I wrote (possibly many years) previously and use it differently without understanding the nuances and possible consequences.

Searching GitHub is now my default for working out how to use an undocumented API.

By searching for uses of the method/class/whatever, I can see how/if someone else has made it work. Not in a contrived example. But, in a real (hopefully) production code-base. If they hadn't made their code public I would have been stuck. I see making as much code as possible public as a way of paying it forward to other developers.

Seeing that an API has been used successfully by someone else (and how) is incredibly valuable and has helped unblock me from many coding challenges in the last year.
If I can make my code public and potentially help others in the future, then I'm all for it. I'm sure that the only reason someone else will look at my code is if they find it as the result of a search.



While I was sitting on the draft version of this post, I received this message.

"You can't just create a blank repo and leave me hanging!"

"Oh, no!" I thought. "This contradicts what I wrote in that (this) blog post."
I'm not sure it does, though.
This was a question about a name. The name of a repository.
(I find creating empty repositories for possible future projects cheaper than buying a domain and never doing anything with it.)

The name of the repository sparked interest, and they wanted to know more of what I intended for something with that name. (Hopefully, this suggests it's a good name.)

However, with more than 100 public repositories in my GitHub account, I can't recall ever having a random email asking about any of the code they contain.

I think my point still stands.