It was about time to give my GitHub profile a nice intro so inspired by Simon Willison’s blog post I decided to make an intro Readme that auto-updates.
First I made a GitHub repo called bbelderbos, my username. That’s how it works: GitHub defaults to showing the Readme.md of your username’s repo on your profile page.
Now the auto-updating part:
- Looking at Simon and Brett‘s repos I started with a script to parse the Pybites article json and my Python tips repo (reminder: you learn so much by reading other developer’s code!)
- It created this template that the script updates and saves to
Readme.md. - I set up a job with GitHub Actions to auto-update it (again, Brett’s repo was of great help here).
Some other things I learned:
- pip-tools: this nifty tool let’s you specify your dependencies in a requirements.in file.
pip-compilemakes a “rich” requirements.txt file where you not only see the pinned dependencies but also how they depend upon each other (for which I used pipdeptree previously). - Get it working first, then refactor: to get the last 5 tip titles I was making 5
httpxrequests to GitHub.
It later occurred to me that I already have these tip titles in theindex.mdfile of the repo, so I refactored it to parse this file reducing 5 web requests to 1, making thebuild-readme.pyscript almost twice as fast (2.7 -> 1.5 seconds).
Lesson / reminder: get it working first, then optimize. - Some other cool things I used with this script: type hints, jinja templating,
pathlibto read + write files, a bit of regex and functions to make the code more modular.
I hope this inspires you to not only make a “Hi there” Readme yourself, but also to try to keep it updated by pulling in other data sources that are relevant for you (e.g. your blog feed).
Happy coding and sharing!