I have a number of foss tools I have written and have released but under aliases

Question

I have a number of foss tools I have written and have released but under aliases. I guess I am worried that the code is not my absolute best and is not the most robust code around. So I have always thought it was best to keep it hidden and away from my name.

Though I now am wondering if having any code at all puts you about those who have none in this competitive job market?

My code is not bad, it works and works well. But lets just say every circumstance may not be handled in a robust way. Some parts are well written while others are hacked together.

So is it better to have something while it may not be your absolute best rather than nothing?

Explanation / Answer

I see two useful options:

An important thing to remember is that as you improve the code you wrote in the past always looks bad. Especially if you're contributing to FOSS projects as a way to learn new languages or techniques - some of your commits will contain novice mistakes.

What I do is put my personal library code online (the little box of tricks every programmer has) so that people can see what I think is reasonably good code. For a single sample I have a threadsafe logging unit that I first wrote in about 1993 and have improved and re-written since then. It's not perfect but it is reasonably well-designed code, it works and it has been tested. Those three elements are the key ones that I value, and communicating that to employers is a useful thing IMO.

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